That's certainly one kind of minimalism, but I think it goes well beyond what GP intended. While your comment and lifestyle seems earnest, it's a bit too far for most given the GP context, in the sense that rather than minimizing the time taken to do routine things, it optimizes many of them out entirely to the point that it does not appear practicable for most (ex. mattress being the only furniture). Such things can certainly be taken to even further extremes: why buy a mattress? A sleeping bag might do fine and might well be good for your back. Everybody draws a line, and for even relatively extreme folks, that line is certainly shaped by social norms.
I'd wager there's a rather large number of folks like GP intending to minimize the effort required to do drone-ish tasks rather than eliminate them. I don't deny that it's only a logical next step to eliminate them entirely, but that seems a step too far for social conventions. After all, culture defies logic rather often.
I tried living without a mattress for a while. It wasn't super comfortable but it wasn't really a major problem till winter, at which point I realized I would need some more insulation, and a mattress seemed like the best bang for the buck. I might be able to make do without if I lived in a warmer place. Right now, though, the place I'm renting came furnished, so it's not an issue.
(Bonus with a furnished place - I don't need to worry about the kinds of bills that the OC was talking about because one flat monthly payment covers rent, water, electric and internet. My only other bills are phone and media/content subscription services, all of which are also flat rates, set up once and paid automatically.)
For me simplifying my life doesn't mean living with nothing at all, it just means living without unnecessarily complicated or laborious things. Clearly different people will draw a line at different places.
The point of my previous comment was more that it doesn't hurt to try eliminate things from your life, if it seems they're just a hassle. Who cares about the social conventions? I think a lot of people find themselves caught up in the rat race and take part without really thinking about why they're doing it, or whether it actually is worth all the effort. It turns out you can forego a lot of things and, actually, life isn't all that bad. That's especially the case if you are earning a decent salary, so you afford to can go out and treat yourself whenever you feel the urge. I think now is probably a better time than ever before to live simply, because we have immediate access to all the world's knowledge and art from a tiny computer in our pockets.
That's pretty much the exact philosophy I live by. I've definitely found no bed frame to be a hard-sell to family and friends, and it's hard to see why once you've tried all the options. A mattress makes a lot of sense, but a bed frame adds little value unless you are short on storage and one has storage built in, or you aren't mobile enough to get to the ground. But maybe I'm missing some utility that others have found in their bedframes!
Living in Japan now, I had a few months with a padded mat + quilt on the floor as is tradition (and a damn cheap one), but upgraded to a mattress on the floor because the floor was too cold in winter as you mentioned.
There's as much to be gained from taking stuff away that isn't useful, as there is from adding useful stuff to your life.
When I lived in China I found it a lot easier to live this way because the apartments are smaller and there seems to be more of a culture of going into the community to eat at local restaurants or finding entertainment in public spaces.
Now I am back in the North America I think it's harder, because people build houses much bigger, and seem to associate not having much stuff with being unhappy or underprivileged instead of well-optimized and free.
I've found a bit more in common with the rubber tramp and liveaboard communities in this part of the world. They are very mindful about everything they buy because space is limited, so trying to find things that are multifunctional is a high priority. A lot of those things work in houses too.
On the other hand, I don't think their lives are as low stress as I would like, because they end up needing maintain an entire vehicle as well as the stuff in it.
Two other hacks, for women at least, is to quit makeup and shaving. I quit makeup about 5 years ago by accident forgetting to put it on one morning, and then I realized no one at work noticed anyways. Quitting shaving has been more of a corona era thing. I'm not sure if I'll stick with it over the summer, but I've been out a few times in shorts and it seemed nobody much cared. That cuts a bunch of unnecessary maintenance time out of my life, which I can now use for other things.
If you only have a mattress, you can still move to a different apartment on your own. If you have a bedframe, you will need help. I never want to help anyone else move, so I try to keep my belongings small enough to move myself.
Not to mention that order mix is almost always guaranteed to be a highly prized secret that companies rarely give out. You don't see Apple breaking down iPhone shipments by their variants in detail.
> * Four additional gigafactories already in development
Where did you see this? Best I can tell, 4 new models (Cybertruck, Roadster, Semi, Unannounced) are in development but only one more gigafactory (TBD) is in the works. Perhaps you misread things?
Agree though, astounding rate of growth at this scale.
Berlin and Texas are still under construction, with neither having produced a single delivery car yet. I think they did conflate models with factories as you suspect, though.
Berlin factory is not necessarily behind the corner. Tesla is trying to cut corners there but Germany is not Wild West to let them do whatever they want.
Of course, but I'd be more likely to give the job to the person who could decipher such madness and explain it clearly any day over the author.
Code should be written to be understood by humans first and foremost. The person who can understand such deliberate garbage clearly and explain it well to those who don't understand, well, those people are the perfect human debuggers, in my opinion.
They do, but we make exceptions for appliance power all the time. Laundry appliances frequently have a higher voltage circuit dedicated for them, at least in California.
Why not treat the exception as the exception? Appliances might consume disproportionately more power, but they're much more static compared to the variety of devices frequently plugged in and out of a home's sockets, most of which have to lug around an inefficient rectifier with them.
True. But while a high voltage converter might be expensive, it's far more efficient and would pay off costs over the duration of the life of a home. Having a single one of those per home should surely be a net win. The utility is responsible for high voltage AC transforms down to the home, and the homeowner fronts the cost of the centralized expensive but efficient converter to power the DC circuit within the home.
If solar and local generation are thrown in the mix, they bypass the converter and directly power the home circuit.
As it is, typical home electrical systems have no active components. There are just wires, panels and bimetallic circuit breakers. These systems are nearly maintenance-free over a lifespan similar to that of the structure.
A DC distribution system in the home would require both a high power rectifier at the main panel to something like 125 VDC, then many smaller DC/DC converters throughout the home for your usable voltages like 5/9/15/20 V that are too low to be effectively distributed.
All of those things would need to be maintained and upgraded over the years, because there is no such thing as power electronics that last forever. After a few electrician visits, you might find that you haven't saved any money at all.
Even if you have solar, you still need a DC converter because it will not output a constant voltage let alone all of the DC voltages you need for your devices. And generation any further away than your own rooftop is going to need to be stepped up to higher-than-home voltages and then back down for use in your home - all of which is exactly why we currently use AC for distribution.
You forgot the magnetic trip of the breakers and the now-mandatory RCDs. The latter are far more complex than a simple rectifier would be.
And even then, there's no reason such a rectifier module couldn't be a pluggable module. They still last 10~20 years, easily.
I don't see what all those low voltage rails should be for. Computers typically work fine on 300~350 V DC, and if anything, there is reason to go from 12 V to a higher supply bus voltage, actually deployed in some modular servers by now (with a 48 V bus between the local battery backup modules, AC-fed supplies, and motherboards).
The ostensible benefit to DC distribution in homes is to be more economical and simpler for devices that already run on DC - not to redesign ever device ever made to accept mains-voltage DC. If your iPad and your laptop and your blender still need a power brick to work, what's the point?
Using high-voltage unnecessarily to avoid using a DC converter is also not going to save money. Yeah, you can use a 300 V DC motor in a coffee grinder, but why? It's just going to cost more money to make.
90% of things in your home would happily run from 150V DC, even though they aren't rated for it.
Source: I sometimes connect my solar panels direct to my AC wiring without an inverter, and my house works entirely except my washing machine and fridge (both of which have AC motors in). Even my vacuum cleaner works (although it's on-off switch doesn't work, since it uses a thrysistor!). Phone charger, laptop charger, oven, microwave, doorbell, furnace, routers, TV, monitors, desktop pc, all work fine.
If some country declared tomorrow that all electrical devices must accept AC or DC, not that much would have to change.
I had no idea about this. Can it damage things that won't work (eg things with AC motors).
I've been building out electrical in a campervan and always wonder if there were DC equivalents to a lot of things.
My point is, that the European accidentally-DC-capable mains equipment can be expected to complain/sustain overcurrent damage, provided it isn't able to handle US residential voltages.
Hence you might as well take the opportunity and switch to a higher in-house distribution voltage than the typical 120 V.
And that 300 V DC motor may actually be cheaper, as you could run a BLDC driver directly from the DC supply with just minimal filtering.
The enhanced power density and copper-efficiency of these high-frequency 3-phase motors may make up for the cost of said inverter, even neglecting the considerably increased energy efficiency over a typical single-phase-capable "oldschool" motor.
Yes, but single-stage conversion from 48 V to ~1.2 V core/memory voltages is inefficient with the typical buck topology, due to the low duty cycle.
There are solutions based on ZCS (+ZVS) (semi-)resonant switched capacitor topologies that could (technically) do this in essentially one stage. But because they are still somewhat recent and rely on either GaN enhancement-type FETs or low-average-blocking-voltage topologies that make use of e.g. small 5V-capable IC process nodes and some tricks to have the individual power transistors floating.
> But while a high voltage converter might be expensive, it's far more efficient and would pay off costs over the duration of the life of a home
AC is easier to transform. Those transformers are cheap and rugged. DC is very difficult to monitor and control, especially in larger voltage and current levels.
I very highly doubt the lean is expected. The fact is that 2-3 of the landing legs deployed but did not lock into their extended position, which resulted in the lean this time. This also caused structural damage to the engines and tanks, causing the rupture and kaboom.
Tons of amateur space nerds are analyzing every frame of video that's been gathered about the incident. Here's a gif [1] posted on NASASpaceFlight but originally shot by LabPadre that shows that some of the legs on the left extended and then flopped back and forth a bit, whereas the ones on the right extended and stayed that way. Commenters on Twitter have also pointed out the same [2].
This is actually normal, and expected. The issue with these specific Starship tests is that the flight plan calls for 1) a height of ~10 km, 2) not going supersonic. The second one is quite critical, because supersonic flight introduces much greater stresses on the craft.
Given these two limitations, Starship currently carries very little fuel. Think of it like a mostly empty soda can with a few sips sloshing about the bottom. Adding 3 Raptor engines to such a tank makes them way too powerful to run at 100% thrust the whole time.
On the launchpad, all 3 Raptors start off at full thrust until well clear of the pad. At that point, one engine at a time starts throttling down gradually, so as not to go supersonic or exceed the 10 km flight plan. A throttled engine does not burn as cleanly or efficiently, which is what results in the orange exhaust plume. Same as your campfire, blue flame is hotter than orange/red flame, and the bluer exhaust engine is therefore burning hotter and providing more thrust.
As Starship gets closer to the 10 km peak, it shuts off one engine at a time, and finally throttles the final Raptor down as low as it can go. Note that Raptor engines have a minimum throttle that is ~20% of max thrust, below which the only option is to shut down.
The issue is that the vast majority of these ingredients are artificial substitutes for the actual content of a pizza-like-thing that an average consumer might expect. That they are artificial is not in itself inherently an issue (at least to me, although many many artificial additives have been proven to cause problems while manufacturers continue to use them), but the fact that so many substitutions are made all at once in a given product renders any "common" understanding of its health effects effectively irrelevant.
It basically means that you can't compare a pizza made from the basic ingredients that you and I might normally expect to the contents of a hot pocket. Even comparing apples-to-apples, the ingredient list of a DiGiorno's frozen pizza would be wildly different from the basics of a pizza you could make yourself.
Fearmongering over these subjects never helps, but it is fair to raise concern over the unknown effects of the things you consume.
What ingredients of a "real" pizza have been substituted for? That list includes flour, water, salt, yeast, tomato and cheese, which are roughly speaking the essential components of a pizza.
I'd wager there's a rather large number of folks like GP intending to minimize the effort required to do drone-ish tasks rather than eliminate them. I don't deny that it's only a logical next step to eliminate them entirely, but that seems a step too far for social conventions. After all, culture defies logic rather often.