cucumber3732842

>Time and time again in the history of the region a king, pharaoh, or other despot would make examples of rebels, put down rebels, and march armies up and down the region to ensure fealty and assign minor lords to protect a region. They could have found the smelters and destroyed them or seized them, those working on it could have been killed.

And when all those rebellions cost the Pharaoh 3x what they used to to put down you're forced to be a lot more diplomatic. Less extraction under threat of violence means smaller army means worse negotiating position for the next one. It's a cycle.

And for every full scale armies meeting in the field type rebellion there's a lot of "sir a second village has lynched the tax men" which compel you to dispense policing forces, etc, etc.

Just because you "can" do something in moderation doesn't mean it's a sustainable way to run your empire at scale.

You can't "just regulate the smiths" like some 21st century despot because those smiths also make the iron tools those people need to farm to pay your taxes. And you can't just "supervise" them with your loyal people because this is pre-industrial and there do not exist sufficient surpluses to feed those nonproductive mouths.

>Iron weapons aren't any better than bronze ones

"Quantity has a quality all its own"

This is dark side of the "grants with strings" taxes->federal->state->local money flow that the overwhelmingly prevailing sentiment here is to cheer for when it's being used in ways people like.

The opposite usually. Museums are sticklers for originality. They'll bribe some congressman's mistress to get a meeting so they can get assurances the ATF will behave "favorably" so they can import part of a half parted out anti-aircraft system from Chad ur Uruguay or some shit because that's the only place the obscure gun variant they need for the coaxial machine gun in their tank is still available. Or they'll buy the fuselage of some obscure plane that was only sold to the Indian Coast Guard because it shares all the cockpit instrumentation with some 100 series fighter they're trying to undo the 'nam era mods to and restore to it's 1950s SAC trim.

I know someone who's smell/taste didn't come back for years but it eventually did.

Some small % of people have lingering symptoms for lots of disease, not just covid.

Idle hands are the devil's workshop but at a societal level.

> Exactly predicted this.

In the same way that economists have successfully predicted ten of the last three recessions.

The highways are never a problem. However "scary" the highways are in any given place the local roads are worse and people's driveways are worse still.

So of course nobody cares about two cars a year going off a cliff on the federal highway when ten cars a year go off a cliff on the road that's the local shortcut between the center of town and Walmart in the next valley or whatever.

This works fine when you're sicking enforcement on someone and don't really care, the bigger the blast radius the better, you just want to know who to call.

Where it falls apart is "how do I" type questions because usually the legally factual answer is some huge complex state diagram where three local and four state agencies theoretically have discretionary jurisdiction over a your petty af project or business but the in practice answer is that some agency rubber stamps them all with minimal fuss. You can't make the legally factual answer clear because the degree to which people support the status quo is largely predicated on ignorance, but you also can't come out and say in writing that you have a policy of rubber stamping boring stuff.

Basically the same reasons that all but the most minor and narrowly targeted attempts at permitting reform fail.

The thought is nice but in reality you're basically asking the government to give up power and it takes obscene amounts of political capital to force that to happen in most cases.

You misspelled meth. Roofers do meth. Outdoor trades do uppers. Indoor trades smoke weed. Everyone smokes cigarettes. Except the electricians, they smoke pole. Everyone knows that.

>Think if it like this - is the turbine exhaust hot? Then you are losing energy.

Turbines for land uses have heat exchangers to get a lot of this back. Even after those the turbine is still lighter for a given power output and lifetime. But normal engines are a lot cheaper.

Because these things are for unfortunate reasons of historical happenstance, correlated with race. And if you let race into the discussion the evil people who peddled all this bad metrics and bad policy can use it to sow division and get everyone arguing with each other while they quietly dodge blame.

>The correct response to this situation is focus on finding better ways of helping those kids.

With who's resources and at the expense of what other things could be done with those resources. Money is fungible. A dollar spent warehousing problem kids is a dollar spent not helping the decent kids become good and the good kids become great. Education is a numbers game.

>s between actual people.

Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.

It was tried in the 60s and 70s, most seriously by Chrysler, and the emissions and drivability weren't great because it was in the "we need to get it working good before we go back and mop up all the other stuff" phase or R&D. The fuel crisis plus the state of automatic transmissions at the tie kept it a back burner item so development was slow and not a priority nor did other OEMs invest seriously.

Chrysler flamboyantly gave this back burner project up and promised to halt further development as part of the wrangling around the government loan they got to save them from bankruptcy in 1979.

Basically it was a song and dance to win political points among the same generation of absolute genius environmentalist who thought moving a steel mill from Ohio where you can regulated it to China where you can't is a win.

I suspect that had the project died a natural death in the 80s rather than being publicly executed as a warning we likely would see some trickle of development these days since they see like a nice natural pairing for various sorts of EVs and CVT powertrains.

It's also worth noting the degree to which facilities and talent pool overlapped between Chrysler, Chrysler Defense, how much more porous the corporate world was 50yr ago and that that Chrysler did ultimately get someone else's turbine into a running driving mass production vehicles in the form of the M1 Abrams so it's not like the technology is unsuitable on a fundamental level.

Society needs a boogeyman so we can pretend like everyone short of that is squeaky clean.

Well right now it happens on 20-30yr cycles which is enough for the people who implement the bad policy that stops the music to get paid and screw off to Idaho or Florida filthy rich leaving the next guy holding the bag.

Maybe if the tempo were increased the cycle would be so flagrantly visible that possible for the general populace to say "no screw you you and the ideas you peddle are bad"

3mph is a pretty solid walk. 2 doesn't sound bad for an escalator.

This could be a whole sub plot in a comedy with a bunch of out of touch analysts. "he's with her because he's into thick ones", "no that's just how black guys are", "no she must be the throat goat". You could even add a whole additional layer of jokes into it where they project snobbish DC norms onto people who aren't that.

Unfortunately nobody will ever make a serious workplace comedy that ridicules federal intelligence because hollywood and the feds are buddy buddy.

> Les Wexner pumped tens of millions into the university to whitewash his reputation;

The Henkel-Sika-3M lab for sustainable adhesives (I'm just making that up, one doesn't exist) would have a different name and a whole lot less funding if it didn't produce research indicating that whatever it's benefactors want to do is in fact sustainable.

Sales numbers seem to disagree...

Isn't Stellantis selling Ram 1500s at a pretty good clip in Europe no less.

>It's easier to accept red tape once you follow "something happened" down to the idiots who "took it too far". Progress is blocked along the axes your fuckups have access to, end of story. If you don't like red tape quit playing grab-ass around heavy machinery.

<sigh> This is exactly the sort of sneering smugness that makes people rightly hate the safety guy and you are a bad person for as long as you continue to engage in it.

>This may sound idiotic, but it also prevents other "creative" solutions where airlines sacrifice safety willingly to spend less money.

Everyone loves to say this from the comfort of their arm chair somewhere in an ivory tower but literally every aviation and adjacent workplace has a phrase to the tune of "here we cut stupid corners, cutting smart ones is illegal"

Which is to say, the do-gooders in their infinite wisdom have blocked progress on various axis, some of them no-brainers, some of them the most reasonable ones, because once upon a time someone took it too far and something happened. So all investigation of where to save money, where to find improvement, etc, etc, happens on axis of optimization that are frequently absurd. This is where most of the "creative" solutions you deride come from.

Can you at least do the reader the decency of make it subtle by doing a "this reminds me of <link to content>"

I know a lot of people get away with peddling low effort links to various topics and quoting various quips that resonate with the worst of the people 'round here and the number in the top right rewards them for it but a paragraphs long copypasta not even intro'd or followed with original commentary or anything at all is a little too flagrant IMO.

>governments tend to align with what results in the most economic activity being created / moved into their country ("growth").

So explain the last ~50yr of state and local regulation of land development?

>I wonder if the residential 230v standard in many parts of the world contributes to EV adoption.

The veracity to which the government enforces rules that make work for variorus electrical professionals and manufactures has a lot more to do with it IMO.

In some places an EV charger install is a "here's the best we could do, you might trip the main breaker if you fast charge while running the stove and water heater and dryer all at once"

In some places it's permits and panel upgrades, and, "have to bring X up to code while we're at it, that'll be <1/3 cost of car>", and, and, and, (to the cheers of the same demographics who complain adoption is to slow no less).

Typical ivory tower armchair central planner type nonsense. You can't sell a car for "average". If people are gonna take on a $30k+ purchase it needs to also handle some fraction of use cases above and beyond the "average" and handle them without many/any shenanigans.

This is why the F150 is so popular despite the amount of shaming and screeching from blathering idiots about how "you could haul that on the roof of a wagon" and "rent a truck when you need it". This is why the vast majority of EV sales have been dedicated commuter cars or sales to people who's reasonable high end use case is still comfortably within the bounds of what they can do easily. Yes you can road trip an EV (or more realistically, do a 50mi commuting day with no charging at work and then hop in and drive 100+mi somewhere on a Friday night) same as you can haul plywood on a station wagon but it takes a level of care and planning that people don't want to put in.

People.

Want.

Easy.

As the tech gets incrementally better we're seeing incremental increases in adoption, but "oh EVs are good enough now and they would be bought more than they are if people weren't stupid and/or did the math and/or were honest about what their needs are" is not a great take.

There are all sorts of China knockoffs of them going up and down the size scale.

How many homes have heat pump as their sole heating?

That's a useless statistic without knowing if it's their sole heat source. Just based on costs, I'm betting there's a lot of wood stoves and pellet stoves kicking around.

Their fault for not developing it to it's highest and best use so they could afford to pay the taxes /s