CAD is a bit like programming, there’s a lot of ways to do any given task. That can make it tricky if you are doing some tutorials that use one workflow, and then start doing tutorials that use a different workflow.

If you want to learn it, do yourself a favor and take time to find a tutorial that goes from start to finish doing the type of project you want to do so you don’t get frustrated when you get midway through.

Like others said, if you are used to doing something in a different CAD software, you might find that the same workflow is clunky in FreeCAD, but if you start out with a workflow that works well in FreeCAD, you are fine.

Seems like a lot of great changes

They want to merge with Albertsons, who owns the other half of grocery stores: Acme, Safeway, jewel osco, and a bunch more.

Recyclability, too

I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.

Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he’s trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.

Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.

There was an app called Buycott that lets you join “campaigns” of things you are either for or against, and when you scan something, it tells you which positive and which negative campaigns apply to that product and the company as a whole. Koch was on there. Seems like it may have been abandoned years ago, though.

Only if you live in New Jersey

their operating systems could send sensitive information to Beijing

Cool. So let’s pass legislation that prevents any auto manufacturer from sending sensitive info to anyone unauthorized by the owner of the car. Just because you buy a car “assembled” in the US doesn’t mean that your data isn’t being harvested, stored improperly, and sold to all bidders.

Yeah, you could detect a difference between drunk me and sober me, but where does sleepy me fit in? It’s wrong, but not exactly illegal to drive while very tired.

Plus, most laws about operating a vehicle only apply when the vehicle is on public roads.

I wish it were as simple as calling things like your onstar microphone a deal-breaker when looking for a new car, but it seems like every single car out there has many deal-breakers, and you just need to choose which are worst.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/

Thanks for looking through all of this. If I’m understanding right, it seems like Congress is asking NHTSA to do a task that is probably not possible, but they are required to at least go through the motions to try?

It seems like they just told nhtsa to use technology to fix drunk driving so they can wash their hands of the situation and claim they tried to do something, but nhtsa couldn’t figure it out. Why didn’t they tell the NIH to eliminate the cancer while they were at it.

I do believe the technology to detect BAC is too erroneous to inflict on innocent drivers, and technology that could detect impairment through driving characteristics, while possible for individual drivers could never work on a population level. There’s going to be a lot of overlap between impaired drivers and just naturally bad drivers.

Im not 100% sure how the batteries are constructed from all of the cells (and I know it depends on the model), but the re-using process can work a lot better than just pulling out the battery and popping it down. EV batteries are in the range of hundreds of volts, but the cells themselves are about 4 volts. It’s my understanding that the battery as a whole doesn’t uniformly degrade, but you might have individual cells that degrade. If 1 cell in a chain of 10 goes bad, that chain can be made off limits to the battery, so you still technically have 9/10 cells that work fine.

The way a lot of people reuse/recycle/refurb (not sure what the right terminology is in this instance) EV batteries is to test each of the cells themselves, and get rid of the duds, and keep the decent cells. Tesla, for example, all used to use 18650 cells (and I think some models still do), which is the same exact cell that’s in decent name-brand cordless power tools.

When you aren’t required to keep weight, space, and extra circuitry to a minimum, you can really design a system that squeezes every last drop of usefulness out of those cells before they need to be melted down and remade.

I’ve seen people use sheep to keep the plants around panels down. There’s even people who rent herds to big solar farms. That seems like as much of a win-win as I can think of.

Solar panels are about 70x as efficient in getting energy when compared to corn ethanol. If all corn ethanol land (which is heavily irrigated, fertilized, and subsidized) were converted to solar, it would generate 3x the yearly electricity needs of the US.

30.2 million acres * 400 MWh/acre/year = 12,080 TWh/year. US energy use is about 4,000 TWh/year.

We are already taking cropland away for energy production, might as well make it way more efficient.

Not necessarily a great way to do it. Hops grow super tall, so to have solar over them, you need a tall structure. To have a tall structure that can withstand wind loads, you need pretty substantial materials. You are probably better off just using wind permeable shade cloth that you can deploy during the heat of the summer and take down during the cooler months.