• 0 Posts
  • 657 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 15th, 2024

  • I don’t mean you should tell me your criteria. if your idea of success is chess world champion - many have worked 12 hour days for years at it and failed - thus much luck is needed. likewise you may be great at business without ever making CEO. However more modest goals are reached by many - chess national master is in reach of many more. Engineers don’t make near what the CEO does but many more get there.

    i can never figure out relationships but those who study it tell me there are predictive measures of what they call success. (The experts don’t always agree)






  • i guess I didn’t explain well. If your success means a private jet with pilots on call 24x7 that you can afford to fly where and where you want: you need a lot more money than I can help you with.

    your success says something vague about resources to explore your interests. How much resources? If you want to make prinitive pottery that is cheap and a great hobby to be interested in. many other interest are more expensive. There is a reason boat owners call them ‘a hole in the water you pour money in’ - boats are also a fine hobby but if your success includes a boat you need more resources.

    i agree that health is partially luck and so there is always a luck element. there is much you can do to earn money - keeping a great job is partially luck. There is a lot you can do to keep a relationship but there is some luck on if the other person doesn’t leave you. There is a lot you can do for health but some luck as well.




  • Aluminium is very commonly used. It isn’t near as good a conductor as copper, but you can easilly use more toeget results and in most cases that works fine.

    The reason we stopped using aluminimun more is it is relly tricky. when you tighten a screw the al deforms over time and so you don’t get a lasting connection. Al also corrodes to a non conductive state. Many house fires were traced to al wiring in just the few years it was common. We can mitigate all the above issuses but it takes care and so copper is preferred despite al being much cheaper.




  • 100% is the typical claimed number as it is easy to measure watts of electric in and find that is exactly equal to watts of heat out - or if not the difference is easially explained by measurement error. There is no hypothesis (much less theory!) of where the energy could go it it isn’t heat and conservation of energy is enough to also decide 100% efficient.

    The above isn’t the whole story though. If you could somehow measure watts from the power plant output you would discover that 4-12% (depending on a bunch of factors) of the energy is lost before it even gets to your house and so your efficiency goes down. If you measure fuel into the power plant, those range for 10% (old systems from the 1920s only run in emergencies) to 60% (combined cycle power plants) - I’m not sure how you would measure wind and solar. Eventually the universe will die a heat death and 0% long term.


  • I have had to do that - so now you have heard of someone… My house was built in 1973, some of the outlets in locations I believe previous owners would have plug/unpluged often have worn out, and thus I had to replace them. (think kitchen appliances or vacuum cleaners - the same outlets I’m using all the time). There other other outlets that still work, but they don’t grip plugs as well as they should anymore and I am planning to replace. Despite the above, the vast majority of outlets I’ve replaced have been perfectly fine, but with young kids around I wanted modern TR outlets anywhere the kids are likely to be playing.









OSZAR »