Captain Aggravated

Back in the good old days when homosexuality was a felony, the cure for autism was an ice pick lobotomy, and certain people would be killed for being caught in nice neighborhoods? Proper society.

That’s the wrong approach. If you’re installing more than a couple hundred watts worth of panels you should either do an independent system or do a proper grid-tied solution.

Man, in the showerthoughts community I saw someone independently invent Roko’s Basilisk from the AI data center craze. They’re inventing the fucking verification can torment nexus.

I will uno reverse umm achkshually you. Heat is not synonymous with infrared light. Objects with heat will emit energy into their environment as EM radiation. That heat can also be conducted away through contact with another object.

All objects with heat do give off a wide spectrum of EM radiation, with the uppermost frequency being proportional to the object’s temperature. A very cold object might only give off radio waves. Room temperature objects, like you, glow in the infrared. Above 500C or so, objects start glowing visibly red, then orange and yellow. A phenomenon we call incandescence.

Objects that absorb light can and often do increase in heat, PV panels turn some of the energy that strikes them as light into electrical energy rather than thermal energy.

You’ve probably heard of an internal combustion engine, like what power cars and airplanes. Well there’s such a thing as an external combustion engine - a steam engine. A steam engine just needs some source of high pressure steam, the source of heat you find to boil the necessary water is almost a separate problem. You could use a wood fire, a coal fire, an oil fire, a natural gas fire. I’ve seen a small steam engine that runs on a tea candle. Heat from a geothermal vent, concentrated sunlight, or nuclear power.

How about a diesel engine? Large oceangoing vessels with 2-stroke diesel engines the size of a duplex put out a lot of waste heat, plenty enough to boil water and run a steam turbine engine. The diesel engine provides main propulsion, the steam engine powered by its exhaust provides electricity. Ships with such a system can shut down their aux engines while underway saving tons of fuel per voyage.

Photovoltaic panels don’t turn heat into electricity. It turns light into electricity.

Doesn’t scale.

It works great. That’s basically how it’s done in aviation, flight instruction is inherently 1 on 1, so I’d assign my students to do some reading and then it was pretty obvious if they’d done that the next flight based on who was asking questions. The ones that did the reading will come in asking me to clarify something, if they say “Yeah I read it” and I have to do the clarifying they didn’t read it. Oral and practical tests are the standard, show me you can fly the plane.

To make that work, most professional pilots have to be flight instructors at some point. It’s almost certainly the first flying job you’ll get after earning a commercial certificate, and thus spend at least some time doing that job. You’re not going to get that in most college classes, so where are you going to get the labor necessarily to give an oral exam to every student in every class?

A smart board is a pointless accessory that adds no value. If you want to project computer images for the class, a normal screen will do and you don’t fund low life hucksters.

You can have a projector without a smart board.

Smart boards are FUCKING useless. The only partially effective use I’ve seen for one was software training. They’re moderately okay I guess for teaching a room full of students how to use Photoshop or AutoCAD. They’re a pointless gimmick that some CEOs should have their balls hammered flat for bilking the public as hard over.

I think I got reasonable tech training in high school in the early 2000s. I was taught how to use Word and Excel, and made to type up some of my assignments. Years later I’d watch my Gen X boss doing the company books by doing the math on a calculator and then typing the results into an Excel spreadsheet.

That said, I didn’t learn to type in keyboarding class, I learned to type hitting on girls on MSN messenger.

Flight instructor here:

I kept having to undo the damage that academia did to my flight students, because looking things up to make sure you knew it right felt like “cheating” to them. So. Many. People have acadotrauma, y’all. Do you know how often I had to resort to behaviorism models to convince grown ass men it’s okay to be seen using a checklist? I had to ask our chief pilot to watch me do ground procedures on an airplane in front of the student to establish it as a norm. You know, the way they trained Alex the parrot to talk. Because a checklist is a piece of paper with the answers on it and we hurt people for having those. Same with writing down frequencies. What? You’re going to memorize the A/FD?

Or would it be edutrauma?

I grew up in the 90’s, there were Apple //es orMacs with edutainment software on them that we’d be taken to once a week, and by high school there were several computer labs full of Windows XP machines scattered around, a couple “public” ones that teachers would occasionally schedule to take the class to to do some research or type up an essay, and a few that were computer focused, I took a class on MS Office in one of those, and that’s where I was when I first heard the planes hit the towers.

About that time is when it felt like the manager and politician class latched on. That putting computers in schools made them look good, it was a bragging point, “Look how modern and up to date we are” so they’d start to cram computers in where they didn’t need to be. My junior year in college I took a calculus class that was in a CAD workstation classroom. We were told not to touch the large, loud computers on our desks and had to try to see the board around the monitors. That was probably the most egregious case but it happened a lot. “Don’t touch the computers, this isn’t a computer class.” Like all the fresh shiny equipment colleges will walk tour groups into, turn on the lights, show off that they have it, turn the lights back off because no classes take place in there, that equipment is for owning not teaching.

Now the shift is, kids get issued a chromebook and use that instead of pencil, paper and textbook. “We’ll use these because that’s what it’s like these days.”

My father’s Avalon will never show turn by turn navigation on the infotainment screen ever again because the mobile app it requires is dead. Car is 9 years old.

Does that include larger vehicles with larger batteries like the Lightning and Silverado? Bigger battery takes longer to charge.

I told you not to call me on this wall. This is an unlisted wall.

If the Slate had a 6 foot bed, VTL capability, and a little more range I’d be really into it. I’m a woodworker, hauling plywood and lumber with a 5 foot bed doesn’t sound fun.

The folks who really care about tow ratings and range are those who have boats or campers. Which means they do road trips while towing. Do you want to tow a camper on a road trip in a rented vehicle?

Yes, gas trucks also suffer poorer fuel economy when towing. It’s less of a practical problem because it means more 10 minute fuel stops. With an EV, it means more 3 hour fuel stops. It’s fairly easy to equip a gas truck with a larger or additional fuel tank. My S10’s fuel tank is on the left side of the bed; it would be fairly trivial to mount another tank on the right side, or, a Blazer’s fuel tank isn’t that hard to install behind the axle where the pickup hangs its spare tire. Doubling or tripling a pickup truck’s range is something a guy can do at his house. It’s functionally impossible with an EV.

In the United States, if you need more than about 20 tons of freight moved, you use the railroad not the highway. “Road trains” aren’t a thing here.

Regardless, I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to illustrate - your example of a “streamlined vehicle” undoubtedly consumes a lot more diesel than your example of a vehicle which is not streamlined. Isn’t that antithetical?

In absolute terms, yes. A semi truck consumes more fuel than a pickup truck. So does a diesel locomotive. The point is the difference in aerodynamic drag with and without the trailer.

Aerodynamically, a semi truck is the same shape with and without a trailer. Somewhat streamlined nose, flat sides, flat rear. With the trailer attached, that flat rear is just 50 feet further away. A semi truck without a trailer will make better fuel economy because it doesn’t have to accelerate the additional weight or overcome the friction in the additional axles, but the cab has already taken most of the aerodynamic punishment it can.

With a non-streamlined pickup truck, the additional wheel friction and acceleration energy are factors, but you’re also functionally doing this:

So a pickup truck sees a much bigger punishment to fuel economy when you hitch up a trailer than a semi does.

Yes, but a “truck” with a 4 ton towing capacity obviously needs motors with more torque than those on a tesla.

Not necessarily. My S10’s 4.3L V6 engine makes 200 horsepower and 200 foot pounds of torque. It’s rated to tow 7600 pounds, with the addition of a transmission cooler. A Tesla Model Y is rated at 397 horsepower and 389 foot pounds of torque, it is rated to tow 3500 pounds. A lot more factors than horsepower and torque go into a tow rating. The strength of the frame at the hitch, a height sensing proportioning valve, the duty cycle ratings of the power train to name a few. It’s not about “Can this car get this weight moving” it’s “can this car perform a safe emergency stop 9 hours into a 10 hour journey towing this weight?”

As little as 5 to 10% on the highway, not particularly significant.

See that’s the funny thing about EVs. ICEVs get better fuel economy on the highway because the constant aerodynamic drag at cruising speed is less than all the braking you do in the city. EVs are the other way up, because of regenerative braking they get a lot of their energy back when braking, but you can’t get aerodynamic drag back. And that’s without the additional drag of a trailer.

No. That’s not the market targeted by the Cybertruck. The yeehaw sister fucker demographic would rather eat their own face than drive an EV. They’re the ones cutting holes in their beds to run 10 inch diameter exhaust stacks through them so they can prove how much damage they’re doing to the environment.

No, the Cybertruck is for urban nazis. The tech bros who work in fields like IT or software development. They wear slacks to work. Nothing in their natural lives makes them feel like real men. Their hands are soft. They don’t have the first clue what a lathe is for and they genuinely wonder why we have farms when food comes from grocery stores now. They hate blue collar men as beneath them…and yet they fetishize them. Elon Musk is chief among them, and he happens to own a car factory. Enter the Cybertruck, what a ketamine addled techbro huckster thinks a pickup is. It’s a costume worn by males attempting to cosplay as men.