Who here really has the time to stand, think and waste in the shower?

Me, my village gets its water from a spring in the mountains above that provides many times what we consume. Water is just a flatrate utility. The energy to heat it comes exclusively from photovoltaics and solar thermal panels between April and October. Standing under the hot shower is literally free for me in those months.

Rest of the year, eh, okay I either pay for electricity or stuff four more pieces of wood into the stove for half an hour worth of hot shower water, so, basically free as well.

Yep. I dabble in recruiting related stuff at conferences and expos for our company occasionally and I usually meet one or two young people that get the “get in contact!” remark on the protocol sheet. They’re out there, they’re just rare.

Imagine having a job where you can spew buzzword-y bullshit like this all day and never have to show anything for it.

If I promise something in a daily, I better have at least an experimental implementation for it a week later.

So, you go ahead and build one then.

To be fair, personal greed causes the same as well. In non capitalist countries, the answer to this might have been “because Dimitri the quality assurance engineer now has a very light and sturdy hunting stand at home”.

Herbert Feuerstein, a german journalist and entertainer went as far as to record his own one hour feature for his previous employer, a public ratio station in the western part of Germany to broadcast after his death. It’s an hour of his favourite music, him telling the story of how all that came to be and some remarks on life and everything. I quite liked the idea and the way he executed it.

We’re getting one free newspaper per week here 🤷

Just let a few sheets of old newspaper soak it up and burn it in the stove or the barbecue, done. Have none of those, just throw the hardened paper in the trash.

Okay, okay, you had to get that out, right? Better now?

People around here usually have trailers behind their normal cars for that. Works fine.

The severity of the problem depends on external factors:

• do you live in a dry and salt-free environment? No problem.
• did the maker of your car implement disc wiping as a precaution? No problem.
• did the maker of your car implement intermittent brake blending during recuperation? No problem.
• is your car less driven in wet and salty conditions and then always store in a dry, warm garage? No problem.
• does your car have drumsin the rear and near-undersized discs in the front? Less of a problem.

I drive an electric vehicle and the unfortunate reality is, that brakes that are large enough for an emergency stop get underutilized during everyday, regenerative braking. So they rust.

My solution is: Every time I get back to our village in wet weather, I accelerate hard on the last long straight and brake hard to almost a standstill once. No more brake trouble, all four rotors squeaky clean, but any measuring device would write me up as the biggest idiot on the roads out there.

Yes. And awake-keepening because my arm tends to die off like that, but what can you do 🤷

That’s what I guess as well. Well, he’s got that figured out, I think:

They’re basically slightly idiotic guard dogs with an element of surprise.

Same with mine. When he was new to us, he ran away twice so I put him on a leash strictly and put a GPS tracker on him. Thought he just wasn’t one of those off the leash dogs. A year later a friend of mine told me “just cut him loose”. I told him he runs, he looked at the dog and said “nah. He isn’t going to. Try it.”

Was hectars and hectars of his private forest, so I thought “what the hell, we’ll find him with the tracker when he’s hungry” and massive surprise: He really never ran off. Not that day and never since. 20m ahead, 20m back, never have to worry, as soon as people can be heard or he loses sight of me he’s by my side immediately.

That is too general of a statement. I have three EVs in my family, none of them do any temp condition of the battery just by being plugged in. However, EVCC turns off the wallbox when they reach 75% SoC and there is no appointment that day in our shared calendar. Sitting at high SoCs kills batteries, especially in warm climates.

I usually buy refurbished Thinkpads with a year of warranty. There are at least two resellers for those in Germany that I know of, AfB and Lapstore.

A cheap black and white Brother laser printer costs maybe 150€ and will immediately work when pulled from a cupboard after two years.

So, the boys playing with fun toys on your tax dime, at least until it’s time to work. Nice.