I just looked up Cochrane ON because I hadn't heard of it before and yeah, it seems a bit of a mystery to me why it isn't more settled. I live around Edmonton where farming is a major industry, and just for comparison:
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.
My armchair assessment is that both will have their uses. 80/20 is 3-4x the price, but is lighter and more rigid than EMT conduit. EMT conduit is sold everywhere and will be more useful for quick and dirty setups.
For a machine like a 3d printer, I would choose 80/20. For some lightweight shelves, EMT conduit or wood. So I see this product almost as a wood replacement rather than a 80/20 replacement.
You can't use LFP batteries as a direct replacement in your UPS, no. The voltages and charge characteristics are different. What you can do is replace the UPS with a portable battery solution, like another poster suggested. I believe the Anker units are one of the few that can function as a UPS. Most sorta-can, but the key difference most of them lack is that they don't turn on automatically after fully discharging when the mains power comes back on. It's up to you if you need this particular feature.
Will Prowse on youtube I think has some videos comparing and contrasting the different units for this purpose.
Also, most of those power banks don’t switch between power sources fast enough to avoid causing problems.
That said, something I can confirm works on that front is getting one of those power banks, plugging the UPS in, and then plugging whatever into the UPS.
I had several days of uptime on Starlink that way, running it 10 hrs or so at a time on a battery bank, the remainder on a cheap generator.
I actually had a good experience replacing a lead-acid backup battery with an LFP battery in my garage door opener. I guess if the battery has an internal BMS and can accept charge at 52V, it might be enough?
I was recently surprised how bad Google results had gotten. Way back when I used Python heavily a google search would return results from python.org. When my kids were learning python for uni I told them the python online docs were great, but my daughter disagreed. I asked her to show me what she meant and she showed me her google search - the first page of links contained no hits for python.org results. She thought python online docs were crap like geeksforgeeks. It was one of those moments when you realize the world has changed around you since the last time you looked.
I've always been a critic of the algorithm over curation for search. Cheap low effort content has always been orders of magnitude easier to generate than real quality content. The only way to prevent declines of the real content is to put a wall(curation) around serious information providers so they cannot be gamified out of the way by bad actors.
Embracing Googles "battle it out" style of search results has been a net harm to the quality of searching for information.
If the world stuck with the slower but ultimately finite method of curating quality providers we would have an amazing set of resources instead of spam blogs.
Yes, this is very true. In my case, I think my weight loss from mountain biking comes from riding hills I wouldn't normally (and often pushing up hills), eating better (I'm not sitting at my desk and therefore spend less time snacking), and building leg muscle.
Running is a much quicker way to burn calories. I hate running. :)
Agreed, I just learned that the next formula for Formula E will eventually have charging stops. The spec will allow 5kwh of charge in 30 seconds, which is 10% SoC in their case. Pretty cool.
For context, Alberta oil sands have an energy ratio of about 4 to 1, meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels. The world average is about 17 to 1 with your typical Saudi oil about 40:1. It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it. It's essentially a stiff tar that soaked into sand. One of the techniques for refining it (not sure if still used) consisted of importing good oil from the US to dilute it up to a minimum standard so it can be sold. A current technique like mentioned in the article is to heat up the formation with steam until it gets hot enough so that it starts to flow. They use natural gas to heat the steam, so it's essentially a scheme to turn natural gas into oil, but with pollution added to the mix.
What works for monitoring in other basins is obviously insufficient for the oil sands, so it's good to see the federal government funding these sorts of studies. It will likely lead to better monitoring and reporting regulations, but the Alberta government will likely scream that a Trudeau is trying to f** us over once again. The last time in the 80s was plain protectionism, while this is protectionism for a much better reason.
I love my province, but man, are we stupid sometimes.
The oil produced mostly gets shipped to the US, where we sell it at a discount because it's crappy quality. This in turns helps the US pollute more but save dollars in the process. Oil sands oil makes up about 14% of US oil consumption.
If I was dictator of Alberta, I wouldn't do anything to stop production, I would just make a law that any production energy has to come from renewable, non-carbon sources. It would generate a frenzy of research and development that hasn't been seen since the industrial revolution as people pant and salivate at all that money sitting in the ground. :)
I eventually decided I wouldn't work for oil companies any longer. If they want to do it, they'll have to do it without me. It has led me down a fun career path of working for companies I only dreamed about working for when I was in school.
> It's difficult to describe what this stuff is like if you haven't seen it.
I want to echo this point, because it gets talked about in the popular media like it's just another kind of garden variety crude oil, when it is anything but. For the curious, there are independent sellers (on ebay and elsewhere) who sell specimens of the stuff, along with samples of other kinds of raw fossil fuel and energy minerals. It's very helpful for demos and discussions like this one.
This stuff is almost literally road tar mixed with sand, almost like asphalt. It's difficult to break up by hand when cold, and when warm it has a tarry, putty-like texture. Contrast this with light-sweet crude, which is a pale yellow, gasoline-smelling liquid. Once you have a feel for these things, it doesn't take a leap of the imagination to grasp that the latter is going to take a lot less effort and energy to turn into useful products than the former!
How does it compare to the energy ratio of US fracking? It’s a similar process of using heated water (though not steam so maybe a greater volume of water) to break the oil from shale.
It uses a ton of water. I think more than oil sands so, if the oil sands displace some fracking it is a global net positive to have that substation.
About a decade ago I realized we are going to extract all the oil, no matter what. All we can do is try to slow the rate to give nature time to heal and maybe develop counter measures to pollution.
Producing oil from "tight" formations through fracking will not be displaced by oil sands production. It's just cheaper to run with much lower upfront cost. Hard to find numbers here, but scroll down to figure 5 here https://energynow.ca/2023/02/canadian-upstream-oil-sector-su...
So production isn't really subsidized in the traditional sense. Producers actually pay quite a bit in royalties and taxes, and employ people, who also pay taxes. It's more about these externalities like pollution that aren't factored into the total cost of production. Alberta has oil, and when the price is high, oil producers pay top dollar for people, which sucks all the air out of the marketplace, and makes it really difficult for anyone not in oil to stay in business because their people just quit for more money. Then when the price drops, a bunch of people get laid off, some try to start businesses, and the whole cycle starts again. It's difficult to have a well-rounded economy in this situation.
I agree, there's probably a good reason I'm not dictator of Alberta. Several reasons, actually. Something something dehumanizing people something..
Externality is a real concept and so are subsidies, but "failure to take action against some party imposing costs on others" doesn't amount to a subsidy of that activity
Like, if the government fails to crack down on illegal drug distribution and all its associated externalities, is that a subsidy? Where does it end? It's nonsense.
I don't think it makes sense to slice up society into tiny divisions and categorize each one like that. For example the government takes affirmative action to create the concept of land ownership and corporations. Those legal fictions then assist for example this polluter.
I concur in principle in consistent word usage, but I'm not aware of one other than externalities for this issue, and that is too vague to convey the fact that public money is spent in support of their profit.
The War on Drugs helps subsidize the cartels and drug dealers by creating a market that only they can fulfill. We pay an obscene amount of money for sustaining that market.
It's semantics: instead of giving money directly to the organization, let them make money and have the public money be spent to clean up the mess they made. Same difference: private profit and public expenditure for it.
> meaning it takes one barrel of oil to produce 4 barrels
This is a dumb statistic and doesn’t help prove a point. It can “take 3 barrels” to produce 2 and it would still be worth it because it doesn’t actually take 3 barrels. It takes the energy equivalent and the value of oil is the energy density with its portability.
Before non-fossil energy sources were significant, one of the points the statistic it proved was that peak oil scenarios hurt well before you "run out" of oil completely[0].
Today, the statistic is still relevant because we've got other ways to make energy-dense portable fuels from renewables.
[0] unless you can substitute oil for another energy source, which was only sometimes part of those discussions, the rest of the time it was "prepare for collapse!" with images from the original Mad Max films.
http://www.45drives.com/blog/ceph/what-is-ceph-why-our-custo... is a pretty good introduction. Basically you can take off-the-shelf hardware and keep expanding your storage cluster and ceph will scale fairly linearly up through hundreds of nodes. It is seeing quite a bit of use in things like Kubernetes and OpenShift as a cheap and cheerful alternative to SANs. It is not without complexity, so if you don't know you need it, it's probably not worth the hassle.
The truth is almost stranger than fiction. They are members of a group called Dragon Sector and were brought in by the train operator after 6 of their 12 largest trains became unresponsive after having inspections done at a rail yard owned by not-the-manufacturer of the trains. The manufacturer said the trains became unresponsive because of malpractice at the train repair shop and mentioned some condition that didn't appear to be in the maintenance manual. The train operator made contact with Dragon Sector and asked for their help.
It appears to be malicious code included by the manufacturer to prevent third party repair that at one point included geolocation for triggering. Given that the train operator had to reduce train schedules for this which impacted service and income, it might end up as evidence in a lawsuit against the manufacturer at some point.
I would love to know if the checks were as brazen as presented in that post, or if the coordinate checks were obfuscated in some way. It sounds like they just assumed the operator would fold long before even getting at the code and couldn't even be bothered trying to make it look accidental.
The main obfuscation was the way IEC 61131-3 constructs get first compiled to C and then to assembly.
There's a lot of indirection and zero strings in the resulting code, meaning it's very difficult to actually find whatever logic you're looking for. But once you see it, it is obvious and seems like it was built like any other logic.
> [...] It was probably the software author's inability to construct IFs that made it necessary to wait until November 21, 2022 for the planned failure.
Well the error message claims that they are infringing copyright. It very well could be that they are within their rights if the initial license/contract stipulated that they would only service the trains in their authorised locations. This should be illegal, but very well might be.
>Until a few years ago, rolling stock manufacturers such as Newag from Nowy Sącz and PESA from Bydgoszcz were able to dominate the maintenance market. It was mainly them who entered tenders for compulsory maintenance of their vehicles, because other companies knew they were at a disadvantage. At the time, the dominant narrative of the manufacturers was that the "Maintenance System Documentation," a kind of manual for a given vehicle, was the manufacturer's secret, its intellectual property, and under no circumstances could this be passed on to other service companies. This led to a situation in which railroad companies across the country were forced to use the manufacturer's expensive service. And the latter, having a monopoly on repairing its trains, dictated outlandish prices, even tens of percent higher than another company would have given, the rail safety expert points out.
>Our source adds that later, thanks to the European Union Agency for Railways, the interpretation of regulations changed, allowing other companies access to service trains. This led to the opening of the market to other companies in the industry.
This is much shadier than what VW did. VW was working around unrealistic emissions standards -- illegal, sure, but they didn't cause big ticket items to stop working. The train manufacturer here appears to have done something much worse.
Mean daily temperature range (min to max): Cochrane -19c to +24c, Edmonton -15 to +23
Growing season: Cochrane 155 days, Edmonton 123 days
Frost free days: Cochrane 99 days, Edmonton 135 days
Precipitation: Cochrane 90cm, Edmonton 42cm
Around the first world war when the area was being settled, wikipedia quotes "7 months of snow, two months of rain, and the rest black flies and mosquitos. If I had to describe Edmonton, it would be 6 months of winter, one month of rain (June), 2 months of mosquitos, and 10 months of sun.
If I had to guess, the frost free days is a big factor. Even though Edmonton is further north, we benefit from the jet stream coming over the mountains and largely keeping the arctic air mass away from us. The jet stream tilts further south into the US by the time you get over to Ontario so Manitoba and Northern Ontario can get some bitterly cold winds.