HN is HN because its endless September prevents ossification.
There are two simple tools to deal with problematic behavior: downvotes and flags. There’s also the almost simple tool of emailing the moderation team…oh and there’s also hiding stories and collapsing comments.
It might not feel worth doing any of those things, but that’s how proof of work works. Good luck.
I was too young to have experienced the era of BBS
I wasn't, but I didn't...beyond trying to connect a few times unsuccessfully and connecting once or twice and not knowing what to do.
Which is to say the era of BBS's was very much unlike the internet because only a very very small handful of people ever actively participated in BBS's in a meaningful way...remember the famous BBS's like The Well were a long distance phone call for most people...and there was no Google to tell you about BBS's you could call toll free...and long distance was expensive.
If a person was online, it was probably Compuserve or later AOL.
The commercial internet changed everything. For the better.
Anything can happen, but you're predicting the future without any evidence. You just made up a scenario in your head, predicted it would come true, then you can't believe people would say it's ridiculous.
When was the last time this happened with a gas car? How often are fires happening with lithium iron phosphate?
You think a car is going to crashing into a building AND burst into flames AND be impossible to put out AND burn the building down?
When was the last time this happened? Let's think about odds and statistics super hard.
>When was the last time this happened with a gas car?
ICE car fires are easier to put out.
>You think a car is going to crashing into a building AND burst into flames AND be impossible to put out AND burn the building down?
EVs catching on fire and then being impossible to put out is something that has already happened, and in fact as I understand it the latter invariably follows from the former. The only new thing that needs to happen is the fire happening while the car is not out on a road, but inside a building where it can set other things on fire. The fact that the vehicle cannot be put out and can frustrate firefighting and rescue efforts makes an already dangerous situation even more dangerous.
Which part of any of this is straining your imagination?
>When did one crash into a building, catch on fire, and kill people? Surely this must have happened at some point for you to put all this together.
You can't think of a single example of an ICE vehicle crashing into a building, starting a fire, and a bunch of people dying? I can think of two such crashes happening the same day, involving jet engines.
I don't know why this is relevant, though. The topic of discussion is lithium batteries, not ICEs. A vehicle crashing into a building and starting a fire that kills people is not some science fiction scenario that should need to be defended. Your incredulity is straying into bad faith territory.
>you changed what you're saying
I changed it because I think it's it's pretty obvious that the concerning thing is the EV catching fire where it can easily spread to other things. Whether that's because the vehicle crashed or for some other reason is inconsequential. The reason I gave that example initially was because that's just what I happened to have in mind at the time; it makes sense that a crash could damage the batteries enough to cause a thermal runaway, rather than the car randomly bursting into flames for no reason.
>It's only a matter of time before someone gets hit by lightning after winning the lottery too.
Winning the lottery doesn't increase your chances of getting hit by lightning, nor vice versa, but crashing your EV does increase the chances that it can catch fire, and a building is one of the things it can crash into. Having a fire that cannot be put out likewise increases the chances that someone may die from it, compared to if the fire is easily to be put out.
I don't know, do you really find it that unreasonable to be a little bit concerned that cars now have these giant energy stores that if they fail they're impossible to control until they burn out completely?
You can't think of a single example of an ICE vehicle crashing into a building, starting a fire, and a bunch of people dying? I can think of two such crashes happening the same day, involving jet engines.
So your argument is that electric vehicles are dangerous because of 9/11 ?
That's what you said. Cars became planes and suddenly 9/11 is your example and somehow it means that someone will crash a car into a building, the car will light on fire and everyone in the building will dies. These are your words.
I'm not really sure what you think the difficulty is. A firefighter in fire protection gear hooks the burning car with a large metal chain, the other end goes to the fire truck, tow truck or winch, the car comes out of the building.
The building is made of ordinary building stuff like wood and plastic which can be extinguished using ordinary means, you just need to remove the car so it doesn't set it on fire again. The same means (dousing it with a fire hose) can temporarily lower the temperature of the car. Firefighters already have the equipment necessary to deal with toxic smoke.
They are not forced to make those kinds of capital investments if they're unable - they'd be no worse off than today. Those who do get cheaper electricity (in lieu of whatever they could've otherwise spent that capital on).
However, it's the onus of the gov't (regional or federal) to create the investment needed for large, industrial scale solar and battery storage. That's what taxpayer money should be spent on.
The cost of the grid has already been paid for. Upgrades to the grid has a higher per-capita cost, if there's fewer people paying for those upgrades today.
But they're not worse off, because the upgrades are better. For them to be worse off, the upgrades they pay for has to be worse than what they got today.
You should really talk to some California utilities and their wildfire exposure.
And anywhere else, anything you put up you need to maintain. And aren't most grids built with loans anyway? That interest would be born by fewer people.
Not sure if you own a house, if you do, here's a thought experiment.
It's all paid for, right? Doesn't cost a thing to own a home?
yah, this is more for low density/mid density housing, I am sure the roots of 2-3 floor apts should be more than enough to sustain it as energy needs of apartments are lower to begin with. They can also bleed them into parking lots and have cover from the sun.
Even at 2-3 stories, I'm skeptical that there's enough roof surface area to provide enough solar panels to individually cover the electrical use of all the inhabitants. Many 2-3 story apartment buildings don't have parking lots at all - and it's a common pro-density urbanist political project to remove the requirements to build one, because it discourages car use and also makes projects cheaper - but even if they did, a small apartment also means less surface area for solar panels over the parking lot. And once you're in a building with multiple households, that means that the solar panels - and the amount of energy every individual household draws from them - has to be managed communally. I'm glad I don't have to justify the power use of my home server to a group of my neighbors concerned about managing a common resource, and just pay my power bill to the de-facto-monopoly state-regulated electric utility company.
You would be surprised how little power european households consume, but we do have central/gas heating so the math doesn't always work out perfectly. 100-200W for lights/tv/fridge, oven/induction/kettle for 2h ~2000W a day. That's something the solar panels can most definitely handle, of course this is on case by case basis. I consume 300W at idle as I have a home server :)
Apartments have walls too, but we're getting into a territory where it might start becoming ugly.
If you care about getting the population to switch en masse from gas heating to electric-powered heat pump heating - which is an explicit social/political goal of a number of people I know, and one that I'm simultaneously sympathetic to and have serious qualms about - then everyone's gas consumption needs to go down and everyone's electricity consumption needs to go up. Also once you have a heat pump, you have an air conditioner - it's the same technology - and that means that people will want to use it to cool their dwellings in the hot months of the year, even if they weren't previously able to do this with just a gas-powered furnace, resulting in even more electricity consumption.
Honestly, I think it's fine to just keep the electric grid as it is, and not attempt to power every building only from the amount of solar electricity that it can generate from its roof area. The electric grid lets us take advantage of economies of scale, build gigantic solar arrays or nuclear power plants on cheap land outside of town, and crucially leave the management of that grid up to one well-known organization rather than a consortium of several households in an apartment.
Well yah of course, the grid is useful. But new developments should just include solar and storage and simply become the grid I think that's a no-brainer, off-grid or micro-grid would obviously better, but I'd settle for a mix.
To a first approximation, an inability to get UL certification means a product failed to demonstrate compliance with well established safety expectations…technically it means the insurance industry will not treat it as ordinary risk.
The ramifications range from inability to obtain product liability insurance for manufacturers, the voiding of general liability for users, and the fire marshal shutting down places where the system is installed.
Keep in mind that new products get listed under new standards developed by manufacturers all the time. But only when the new standard demonstrates ordinary safety.
The simplest likely explanation is that vc did not believe the technology was worth betting on.
Yes I remember this story, and something like this was the case - the product's readiness and market viability was overstated, and the company has been tossed around between investors for quite a while.
This is consistent with good photographic technique that prioritizes "getting it right in the camera."
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