It is my personal opinion that a crossing is better emphasized with light from above. Snow cannot cover light.
As for bumps... there are bumps that work right (harm the suspension at speeds above the limit), and then there are bumps that harm the suspension at any speed. Road builders over here cannot seem to get them consistently right.
Also relevant: "Always shoot the messenger first." :)
If news unsettles a person, and there's a cognitive dissonance upon processing their world model ("everything OK with climate") and sensory input ("another big freaking hurricane") then if the person isn't a model of rational thought and already has a fad for conspiracies...
...one might find it easier to add another conspiracy theory to one's collection, as opposed to harder steps like refreshing one's model of how the world functions. :o
Guy seems to be a walking disaster.
No matter whether he intends what he says or not, that's definitely not how a presidential candidate should behave. If one wants to govern a country (as opposed to running it into ground), at the minimum one should not be ridiculous.
Last time, I recall, it took him a fairly long weaseling to use the border guard a bit, here and there. I don't think the US military is eager to do his bidding, or cheerful about being drawn into his campaign.
Over here, in a different country on a whole different continent, the previous (now retired) commander of the defense forces had a habit of providing fact corrections when politicians lied, spinned or bluffed about defense. For a reason which didn't need a detective to figure out, only conservative populists ended up on his shit list. :)
One of the conservative populists took being corrected so personally that he got into a social media confrontation with the general right before elections. Politologists later estimated that it was not beneficial at all to the politician involved. :)
That's quite understandable.
On related notes, my first disassembly of an EV battery pack was very slow and careful, and the surface, boots, gloves and tools really carefully considered. Of course, EV batteries have those safety jumpers which split the pack in two, but even the halves are dangerous enough to worry.
Indeed, I have nothing here that would draw 35 kilowatts. :) If I weld, the maximum is 4 kW, if I charge my car, the maximum is about 3.6 kW. By the way, I've observed that most of time, the MIEV cruises at around 10 kW - accelerating is a whole different matter of course. :) If I get a bit more, I'll be happy, but I don't expect a lot more.
I have no power grid here. Maybe next autumn, but I only asked them to build a laughably small connection of 3 x 6 A, to act as a backup in case my systems are catastrophically broken) so no grid tie. Since it's a really curious location (no official road either) I wonder if the grid operator actually manages to build it in one year. :)
As for inverters, my setup isn't new or shiny - there's a legacy DC-AC (poor choice of brand name from some Taiwanese maker, even I can't find their website because their name is so generic) 24 V 5 KW inverter. It produces modified sine wave, was too expensive, and the first one that I got developed a fault and was replaced. The replacement has been running my house for the past 5 years. It will retire when I manage to move over to a 48V system voltage.
...and its replacement is a somewhat newer Maximum Solar PIP-4048MS (no longer produced, but they make similar ones). It's actually less powerful (only 4 kW) but produces a pure sine wave and I bought it used for a really good price.
Although the new(er) inverter can act as a charger (drawing power either from solar or a generator or a power grid) and likely it soon will, I have 3 separate chargers, each for a different panel array. All of them are Maximum Solar PCM60X. I mostly chose them because they have passive cooling and they've been working for several years.
They are supposed to have a capacity of 37.5 amp-hours left and I'll have four stacks in parallel, so I'll have around 150 amp-hours.
If I multiply that by the average voltage under load (16 cells per stack x 3.85 volts per cell = 60 V, but I might have to compromise and go for 15 cells per stack), I get 150 x 60 = 9000 Wh = 9 kWh. A factory-fresh battery of this sort has a dozen more cells and is supposed to hold 16 kilowatt-hours. Since I drive one of those cars, I know from experience that 9 kWh is a realistic estimate, but I'll find out the true capacity later.
Seems like a useful monitoring and accountability tool. :) Especially if its quantity estimates can be made accurate.
I think the study analyzed the footprint of the person, not the vehicle:
In this new study, the research team investigated whether consumers who purchase and drive such vehicles have a smaller carbon footprint than other consumers
The merits of electric vehicles are irrelevant to their study - and their study is irrelevant to the merits of electric vehicles.
So maybe they're not lying (or maybe they are, if they made a direct claim about the power mix of the Finnish grid), but they're definitely far from barking under the correct tree. They're barking in a different forest, not of transport economy, but of wealth and consumption. :)
The proliferation of a new technology typically doesn't start from poor people.
It starts from fanatics first. I built my first EV. It was crap, I cut it apart and sold the metal (environmental footprint: awful). Then I built my second EV. It drove around 10 000 km, but had to be retired due to metal fatigue (enviromental footprint: neutral at best, lesson learned: big).
I bought my third EV on a crashed vehicle auction. New front axle, stretching the frame back to correct dimensions... I drive it every day, but it's a crap car that I'd not recommend to my worst enemy. :) Environmental footprint: positive, I can produce fuel for myself from April to October. But if the same vehicle would be used by someone who doesn't produce (or buy) renewable power, the footprint would be less positive.
Anticipating the demise of my factory-made electric microcar, I am however building another EV. Again the footprint is negative, but I need information about how to easily manufacture one, and obtaining information has a cost in resources. :(
Meanwhile, of course, truly rich folks buy fancy and electronics-laden self-driving EVs which some then proceed to crash or mishandle due to lack of clue. People are like that and it will stick out in statistics.
IMHO: if they hadn't bought an EV, they'd have bought another kind of status symbol and would have used it even more wastefully. What matters more is what the average person can and will do. And how do we influence the auto makers to produce less resource-intensive vehicles?
Here in Estonia (pretty much across the globe from New Zealand), around 00:40, I was walking home with a wheelbarrow across the field.
And behold, somewhere above my house, there is a red-green cloud, while north along the horizon, I see green pieces of ribbon.
So of course I got a tripod and camera, dialed 2 seconds of delay (pressing the button makes the tripod wobble) and 2 seconds of exposure and got this. It wan't as fancy with bare eyes, but was fancy enough to hurry. :)
I have a solar panel that died. A piece or plywood flung by a storm went right through it, leaving a 30 cm "wound".
Well, to be honest, it's alive, just weaker - the panel remains suitable for pumping water on the field during muddy season. I wouldn't take a good panel to such a bad place, but this panel, I have no worries about.
As for what happens when they really, really die - they get disassembled. The aluminum frame gets taken off and goes into metal recycling. Junction boxes go to where plastic goes - not a nice place. The glass and doped silicon go into a crushing mill, after which they get separated. The glass is easy to recycle, but the doped silicon is difficult to refine again to such a purity, so it likely won't become a solar panel. But it's a very small fraction of the panel's mass.
It's hugely expensive, but I expect most of the cost to be in the wagon that lays panels down and picks them up - and could hopefully service a big stretch of railway (if it works). That kind of systems will cost a pretty big penny.
I doubt if this project will "fly", however. A totally horizontal solar panel at ground level is a far cry from producing energy efficiently.