Meanwhile there is literal beheading going on in France - but mainstream media is completely silent on topics like immigration. The general dissatisfaction with mass immigration in the USA and Europe, and the failure of the mainstream media to acknowledge this, is what is fueling the rise of Breitbarts.
We need to begin building that smart charging/discharging capability into electric cars now, then.
We need to establish the regulatory and user interface standards around this ideally before we start manufacturing tens of millions of EVS each month.
It might make sense to also unbundle electricity for consumers, charging the live wholesale rate and indicating the pricing via apps, alerts, or indicators on the meter itself.
If these can be demonstrated safe it seems reasonable to place them close to cities - providing electricity and district heating.
The air pollution problems of Poland could be resolved a year after these were built, for example, by connecting them into and expanding existing district heating systems - meaning no one would need to burn coal or trash in ancient home chimneys.
> you could get twice the impact out of insulating ...
Yes, the concept of "negawatts" which was popularized by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Amory Lovins in particular in the 1980s, seems to have vanished from the discourse.
Insulate properly and improve efficiency of usage, and suddenly your energy supply problems are a lot smaller--plants, transmission, distribution, raw materials, waste: all of them.
It might be somehow hard to believe, but Ukrainian is actually distinctive language with different words, different phonemes and orthography. It's not interchangeable with Polish.
It's obvious what is being conveyed here, and I question the intellectual honesty of your statement. I posit that by "playing dumb," you hoped to be able to convey the notion that there's no "obvious" message here.
Being on lockdown is making people ill and driving them crazy. This is being compounded by the cognitive dissonance embraced by half of the media-consuming world, which is telling them that their attacker is a respiratory virus, and not their local, state, and national governments.
Many people live in a society today where, saying this to the wrong person could get you injured, ostracized, or even killed - or, you may even get branded with the worst noun of all: racist. Anxiety is clearly through the roof everywhere you turn - now, I wonder why this is?
Are we actually going to go around thinking that these high-anxiety times haven't contributed to peoples' illnesses?
I hope you are not so cocksure in every part of your life. It helps sometimes to understand what the other person is saying in more details than jumping to conclusions and then responding with emotions.
I take it that you are challenging my intellectual honesty, I am unsure about your intellectual curiosity.
There was nothing more that had to be said by the parent. You were - quite clearly - trying to discredit the parent poster for making a very reasonable statement.
I am not moved at all by your "hopes." I am quite certain that I am right. I would not have written anything, otherwise. But of course, that's none of your business - my words are more than enough to convey the meaning I intend, as are yours, and as were the parent poster's.
My intellectual curiosity is what allowed me to land on both of my feet and look at the COVID situation for what it really is. It wasn't hard and it only takes some "distancing" from corporate media sources to see what's going on.
I totally get what he is trying to say. It is becoming so obvious after 8 months of social isolation, lockdowns and a ton of toxicity in the community. The aftermath of this "lets lock down everything to protect a few" strategy is going to be horrible. Not just economically. Lockdown lovers seem to think people are machines that you can turn off and on whenever you like. Thats not the case.
That we live in a stressful time, which we are being reminded of constantly, and lockdown (With its restricted social interaction) is hard on mental health.
I don't think anyone disagrees that lockdown is hard on people. The cost of lockdown is worth it, but lets not pretend that its free.
Sweden, without COVID lockdowns, is on track for fewer deaths in 2020 than 2018.
The country also has a lower COVID deathtoll per capita than Belgium, Italy, USA.
Lockdown is not a solution. Dealing with air pollution (ending the burning of coal and oil) and obesity (banning and taxing added sugar) would yield significantly greater benefits and require much less cost and effort.
So can thousands of people dying all around you. Lockdowns are much, much better than seeing grandparents or parents die in over-exerted hospitals, seeing already sick children or young people who were managing their diabetes, congenital heart conditions, cancers, HIV infections etc. suddenly taken by this horrible, preventable disease.
Which is completely sufficient to vaccinate the elderly, teachers, immunocompromised, and healthcare workers in the Western world, and probably anyone else who really wants it.
There's no need to completely eliminate COVID - we don't aim for the same for regular influenza. We should aim to reopen economies as soon as possible instead.
“As a luxury brand, our customers are more likely to have a home where they can charge a vehicle, an office where they can charge a vehicle, their favorite spots to go where they can charge a vehicle"
Translation: don't expect a lot of range from our heavy and aerodynamically inefficient vehicles.
Well yeah, people that own Bentleys use them for in-town transit with air travel between cities. Country estates get land rovers, and there's a driver to handle the details of charging.
To be fair, the W12 engine models were not blessed with a great range to start with. Especially if you were driving the automobile in "normal" fashion. They are very thirsty mashines with 90 L tank - the official 13L / 100 km consumprion is a very 'idealistic' information, you can easily double the fuel consumption.
That is why the V8/V8S got so popular and had far more then 50% share when I quit. The range (and more sportive driving characteristic) in comparison to the W12/W12 attracted more clients. That might have changed with the Gen3 GTs, since they use a different platform.
Source: I sold Bentley's as a side job for quite a while (Gen1-Gen2, quit when Gen3 came up).
Airborne transmission of COVID is sexy, requiring solutions like this, and individual impositions like wearing masks which are easy to police.
But I think the more likely spread of COVID is from mundane surface transmissions. One of the 'mystery' COVID cases in New Zealand was eventually tracked to people touching the same elevator button about an hour apart, for example.
Same here in Europe - everyone is wearing masks, but how many times is the apartment entrance handle touched by people each day?
Scientific research has not found much evidence for transmission by touch, known in the literature as fomite transmission:
"The principal mode by which people are infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is through exposure to respiratory droplets carrying infectious virus."
You see this in the guidance by major health organizations. For instance the WHO clearly says:
"Current evidence suggests that the main way the virus spreads is by respiratory droplets among people who are in close contact with each other."
It probably can happen. But contact tracing hasn't found much evidence for it: the majority of infections can be explained by close contact from an infected person.
Re: masks, surgical masks and cloth mask far from 100% effective against small particles, with filtering efficiencies of 50% or less common though the fabric. Filtration is even less when you take into account air that bypasses the mask (the reason why your glasses fog up is because of air that isn't being filtered).
Also, very large numbers of people use them incorrectly, eg by leaving the nose uncovered, and leaving gaps. I don't think this is a matter of education: people know what correct wear is, and don't do it because it's much easier to breath if you defeat the mask's filtration.
Most people aren't wearing masks around family and friends anyway.
yes, masks are not a panacea and are highly politicized. we need to stop focusing on them, and focus on (semi-)private social gatherings of friends and strangers (high heterogeneous mixing coefficients) where most of the community transmission is happening, rather than wearing masks on the street (or even in grocery stores) where transmission risks are practically non-existent but compliance is conspicuous (but ineffective).
Stairs, or press buttons with tip of key. Entrance Door with foot or paper tissues. If 1 in 200 have Covid, 50% chance elevator has been recently infected.
First it was the bats and the pangolins who gave it to the people. Then we gave it to the minks who gave it back to us, mutated. Now even the elevators can catch covid?! What's next? I sure hope it doesn't mutate and hop to vegetables or else we won't be able to eat anything!
Now we can get back to destabilizing the Mideast, offshoring our manufacturing jobs, starting more endless wars and transferring the rest of our technology to China. The Trump years were just a speed bump on the way to complete globalization.
