
Trade Opportunity?
Some UK water companies have been complaining of lack of the stuff. Perhaps they should put in an offer to Japan to buy theirs?
Or maybe Japan should bottle the stuff and sell it as an energy drink!
828 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2007
There are a lot more computers¹ than there are vehicles, and computing power consumption is routinely close to 24×7 while vehicle power consumption isn't (possibly equivalent to 8×7), so even if every vehicle on the planet went electric, I don't think total vehicle power consumption would ever reach that of computing.
Note that I didn't say *all* "AI" is a waste. But the likes of ChatGPT aren't genuinely doing anything constructive, are they?
¹ I suspect there's probably more computers than just about any other single electrical/electronic device there is, other than smartphones (though they are computers really).
Charging a car at 56kW is a short-term activity (1hr tops), while a 15kW GPU in a DC will be running 24×7. So that 15kW GPU will use more electricity than the car on a daily basis, and of course, it's not just *one* 15kW GPU - it's an entire DC full of the things.
Even worse, a lot of this so-called "AI" computing appears to be just a huge waste of time and energy with no discernable useful output - unlike the car, which at least serves an obvious purpose in getting people from A->B (although that activity might be unnecessary).
It shouldn't, and the better charging networks do support contactless payment.
But "the modern way" is to shove everything into bloomin' smartphone apps, so that tends to be the default action now. This has superceded the previous "web first" idiocy, and will no doubt be followed in a few years by something else equally hair-brained.
If petrol forecourts were just being invented, they would be implemented along the same lines.
That breaks down as $65m to make the show, and $400m set aside for lawsuits when <insert allegations of your choice/ cancel culture retrospective sin of the month> happens due to the actions of the <male lead/ female lead/ non-binary lead/ director/ producer/ alec baldwin/ all of the above>.
The Twizy has such a small battery that they fit it with a standard domestic plug. There are a few public charging points that offer 13A sockets, but they're going the way of the dodo.
There is a Type 2 to 13A socket adaptor available that lets it use a wider range of charge points.
Ionity charge 69p/kWh for open access. It's deliberately priced so that almost no-one does, but lets them claim to be open "unlike Tesla" (though I keep coming across rumours that that may change).
If your car comes from one of the manufacturers in the Ionity consortium (BMW, Ford, Hyundai, Mercedes, VAG), you'll be able to get a much better rate.
The supermarkets with rapid chargers are about the cheapest - Lidl are at 25p/kWh, Tesco at 27p/kWh - and their slow chargers are usually free (I don't see that being sustainable!).
That's exactly how I charge my car on long trips using rapid chargers at Rugby services, Toddington, Baldock, and a couple of others I've used.
At work, I just plug in (13A socket).
When shopping, I plug in (7kW charging point). If I do nothing else, it'll only give me a 15 minute charge and then stop, but if I use an App (ugh) or log in online, it'll charge for as long as I'm there.
In some places I shop, there's a rapid charger option which is then back to "plug in, tap to pay, do stuff, unplug" again.
It's interesting watching the EV charging environment dynamically changing. I imagine it's not that dissimilar to how petrol forecourts developed in the post-war period as car ownership took off.
The crucial difference is that almost anywhere a car can be parked can potentially have some charging capability (even if it's only 3kW).
I suspect that eventually it'll be routine to plug cars in whenever they're parked, and that rapid chargers will be mainly used on long journeys.
1. "Type 2" connectors are pretty much universal for AC charging (generally for slow charging, but can support rapid charging at 43kW [for compatible combinations of charger and vehicle]). For rapid DC charging (50kW+), there are two main connectors - CCS (VHS!) and ChaDeMo (BetaMax!). CCS has essentially won this particular war (it helped that CCS is an extension to Type 2, so a single port covers all charging options).
2. The charge networks are rapidly moving towards contactless payment as the main method. It'll be interesting to see if their membership schemes (which usually give lower unit prices) survive.
3. They do (or is that what you were saying?).
The question that remains then is what's the 2nd-most prevalent OS shipped with new PCs...
Windows is assumed to be #1; you state ChromeOS is #3 and macOS #4. While I wish it was possible, I don't believe Linux can be #2, but what else is there? Or did you really mean that ChromeOS is now the 2nd-most [...] ahead of macOS?
Not only should they stop aggressively pursuing those least able to defend themselves, but how about actually getting rid of the loopholes by abolishing all the various unnecessary different ways of taxing work, and just make it so that all forms of direct remuneration for work are taxed the same.
I thought at first (before spotting the problem) that the potato picture was a topical reference to this story:
Indeed, I added yet another IP block to my firewalls today after receiving spam from a previously unseen OVH server.
I did bump into a way to list all the IP blocks registered to an organisation recently, but now can't quite find it again (something ARIN/RIPE/etc whois based, I think).