Reorte

On the other hand whilst standards of living might remain I can't see quality of life doing anything but decrease, especially if we have an ever-increasing population.

There's an Archimedes screw generator not far from where I live. I've been past it a handful of times and only seen it operating once.

Bosses like that are part of the vicious circle that drags us all down... And they're caught up in it themselves, you can either be part of the race to the bottom or go out of business - it's beyond me how we solve that one. Emergency services generally aren't doing very long trips like that. Occasionally it's needed and I sincerely hope that if there are benefits to the emergency services for petrol and diesel powered vehicles they'll still be able to get them no matter what the rules are in general.

I'm in favour of small projects to a degree but being small, even if numerous, they probably won't add up to much. Still, use them where they should be. It would be very nice if the former mill site behind me had the lake restored and used to drive a mini hydro scheme. But it'll probably just end up with as many houses crammed in to it as possible.

All those tin shed buildings that have sprouted like toadstools everywhere over the last couple of decades do seem good candidates for them. Existing ones presumably won't be designed to take the weight though, and I believe the fire brigade isn't happy about solar panels on roofs (can't stop them generating in an emergency). I assume both issues can be designed around for new but might limit retrofitting.

Rather than coming up with more ways of coping with renewables I'd rather we just went down the nuclear route, whilst investing a great deal more in to fusion. Large-scale wind and solar should only be seen as a stopgap measure.

Maybe it's time to step back a bit - getting around the country is very fast and easy on the whole, even with crowded motorways. Would it really be such a bad thing if we slowed down a bit?

Yeah, the thing that really puts me off isn't electric cars, it's (as I was going on about earlier) the amount of electronics in any new car. Some love them, I'm at the opposite end of the scale. I'd go for a conversion of my current car if it was practical.

The ease of refilling a petrol car is an argument for wanting a longer range on an EV, but I'd imagine that the reality is that unless your job involves spending most of your time on the road a little bit of planning around the occasional longer journey really won't be all that much of a problem. I think a guaranteed 200 miles in all conditions range would be enough for me personally.

^ For a cat that would be the time and place...

Grr, yes! They stop leaving a huge gap, I just saw the lights ahead go red so I know the queue isn't about to start moving, so put the handbrake on, then they creep up to fill the gap they'd left leaving me look like the one with the big gap. Related, some people never seem to know where the lights are at the line, always stopping half a car length over or short but never at.

Unfortunately there seems to be a trend to reject anything as being worth having if it doesn't tick the "efficiency" box or make money. I greatly fear a push towards an bleak, sterile, massively "efficient" world. Some moves in that direction are a necessary evil but it's rapidly becoming less and less like a world I want to live in.

Maybe this is just being pedantic, but two actually, the other is rinderpest (a cattle disease).

Cheers, yes, that's the situation.

Charming. Right turners in to the road on my left would be using the space covered by the box junction (if they're turning from right to my left that implies they're coming from the other direction). Please explain quite how I'm supposed to leave space for a car BEHIND me to turn right at the box junction without entering it myself.

To be fair I think that's not really the reason EVs are expensive - the batteries aren't cheap and we're still in relatively early stages of them, so the economies of scale and maturity aren't quite there yet. Most of the electronic features we're talking about here are in almost all new cars, electric and otherwise, so they can't really explain it. Mechanically speaking an EV is rather simpler than an ICE car.

Got honked at this morning for not pulling forward so the car behind me could turn right. The reason I didn't pull forward was because it was a box junction right in front of me. Didn't get too long to see them fuming though since it cleared a few seconds later.

And with that last sentence that's killed the temptation to snap back due to it making the post fact without any opinion attached as to whether there's merit or otherwise. Crafty!

But I am a vehicle owner - what would the engineer be able to do with that space that me, as the owner, would want that I don't have now?

Although no mechanical gears on an electric car isn't something even I have a problem with... On the safety front whether or not that adds up to something significant or a hypothetical I wouldn't like to say; regenerative braking is likely to remain functional?

Handbrakes costly to maintain or repair? Never had a significant issue with them, or found myself wishing I could use the space in the cabin for something else. I can see a significant advantage in an automatic washing machine, so that's why I've got one instead of a wash board and a mangle, but I'm finding the ever-increasing level of complex electronics to do simple, straightforward tasks that worked fine anyway increasingly absurd. Doesn't mean I'm against them in everything of course - I'm assuming there's clever software involved to get the most out of the battery for example.

What real advantage does any of that have over a straightforward, simple handbrake?

Second jab for my parents today. They're not the types to rush straight out in to a crowd anyway but it's still good to know.

Oh gawd, not the metric debate again, which wasn't anything to do with the Sherlock Holmes example (yeah, it would if they were convenient fractions of a kilometer, but the same's true if they were convenient fractions of a mile, like the quarter mile posts are, no difference really). As for "simpler", it would be if we all had the same everything and all individuality was destroyed, but once things do the job well enough I'm satisfied and generally find "improvement" just make the world a less interesting place for what are really generally quite trivial gains masquerading as "so much more convenient" (a phrase I've come to loathe).

Some aspects help - one yard a second is very close to 2 mph, so a telegraph pole every 2 seconds would be 60 mph. So it's then down to how good you are at doing a single division mentally - the sort of thing that might be simple for Holmes but isn't for the likes of me who's been using calculators and computers for those sorts of numbers for a long time!