A looming copper crunch and why recycling can’t fix it

If you have well water or water from anywhere other than a utility that controls the chemistry correctly, the water can dissolve your pipes. The rainwater from my roof makes copper instantly shiny, which is a bad sign for the copper.

Copper lasts 50-60 years. I believe that's type L which is used in the wall in homes in the US. The skill required to create a high quality copper joint takes time and a person may still make mistakes. A PEX compression fitting is basically just closing a tool. The probability of mistakes is lower.

I'm not familiar with the possibility of contamination in pex, is this due to the material?

Wouldn't it be better to sequester the carbon in a landfill rather than return it to the atmosphere?

I learned that the hard way last year. Had PEX water lines hard freeze during the crazy February weather in Texas area last year. Thankfully no burst pipes!

Those were PB/Polybutylene pipes.

When? I live in Alberta.

(okay a bit tongue in cheek)

Single strand solid aluminum conductors expand and contract due to heat changes from high draw, they can work themselves loose, and eventually create shorts and fires. They make special connectors so you can remedy this by attaching a small piece of copper wire (a pigtail) to the aluminum, and don't need to replace all the wiring in your house. This of course means that we could just legislate for better connectors throughout the building, as we should do anyways, and we could safely use single strand solid conductor aluminum wiring instead of copper virtually everywhere.

The aluminum wires of today are a different allow of that simply does not have the problem anymore. It's a solved issue. You don't even need anti-ox on the connection.

But 50 Hz as a system frequency is just wrong. It results in oddities like running your railroad at 16-2/3 Hz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMmUoZh3Hq4&ab_channel=Techn...

The central gov will have to squander trillions of RMB to clean this mess and fast. the reactionary & corrupt friendly nature of officials showed its results

They are pushing for more development to keep the economy going. It's all a mess.

Btw china has its real estate sector (homes fo speculation, public infrastructure for gov) debt fueld at unsustainable levels (affecting also tax revenues at local level that are dependent or land leasing for financing themselves), the bubble is bursting, how fast and dangerously will depend from gov reaction. bail out is the most sounding solution but the gov is doing too much QE already and will have to make sacrifices here or there. Easy growth is over forever, skills are neeeded now, a problem with XI leadership.

Actually, I'm remembering there were some widespread failures of PEX-C. Hmm.

https://insideevs.com/news/519382/tesla-model3-82kwh-chargin...

Nope, the charging circuitry (most commonly) and/or BMS (less common) inside the car can handle this easily.

In practice you need a high fidelity weight sensor and a handful of transistors.

If you come to Austrian supermarkets at rush hour, the lines will last several minutes. It not uncommon to hear disgruntled customers (usually old people ironically) yell at supermarket employees to open another till after waiting for ages.

In Germany I paid cash for every casual snack-grade transaction, and some bigger ones like restaurant meals. It seemed totally normal and I was happy with that.

In Denmark I never saw the currency at all and I have no idea what it looks like. I never used it and I never saw anyone else use it. Contactless everywhere.

I much prefer cash and regret its disappearance from use in my own country - we are about half-way between the German and Danish experiences above, perhaps closer to the Danish end. A holiday in Germany felt more like a holiday because of this detail. What it feels like when you actually live there is another question.

But this stuff about cash is something of a distraction from the question of metal use - it's increasingly apparent that although electric cars may be an improvement on oil-driven ones, they are not in any useful way the solution. Being rid of cars and basically all powered individual transport may be both dreary and extreme, but what alternative is there?

Small shops often prefer or only take cash, or accept card payment only from a certain amount due to fees of the processors. I heard small businesses prefer cash for tax reasons as well.

Now: while cash is still normal, just about everywhere has contactless credit card terminals. I don’t even get a second glance when I ask to pay with a card at the bakery for a 3 EUR purchase. Some food trucks won’t take cash.

However, we did pay for our 17k EUR used car with cash last year, and that is still the recommended way for private used car sales.

It has gotten better after the Pandemic.

Germans use outdated tech because it works. They use cash very rapidly and efficiently. I’d say Germans handle cash faster than paying with physical cards.

//edit: Cashless might imply debit card is accepted, but not necessarily credit cards. Though these are catching up.

For groceries at the usual chains (Edeka, Lidl, Aldi,...) cashless always works, and from my POV always did. For a while many stores only accepted cashless for sales above 10 Euros, but I only know one shop that still has that antique rule. In the past paying by card was something you did for "bigger" expenses; I'm young enough to only have witnessed how that seems to have phased out, but I definitely got strange looks when I payed for an inexpensive item by card. These days most cashiers don't blink an eye when I do so for a <1 Euro item.

As a rule of thumb, the more expensive a place is and the less shady (as in "might cook the books" or "not a drinking hole"), the more likely it is to accept cashless. The "expensive" barrier is coming down ever since: 15 years ago I might have needed cash for a restaurant with the average dish costing 20 Euros, or going out with friends to drink. These days it's safe to assume "if customers are expected to sit down, and pay 10 Euro+, then cashless is probably accepted". Exceptions apply, like that one, new (post-COVID!) restaurant, which insists on cash; and also I go to other places like I did two decades ago while being a pupil or student.

When I go out in our city (six digit populace) I usually assume that I can pay cashless, though if I know the next ATM to be unpleasently far away, I make sure that me or a companion has enough cash, just in case. I still pack some cash when venturing into an unknown town/city.

Overall, I think due to COVID more cusomters now use the option to pay cashless; the only huge impact in acceptance (that I noticed) seems to have been bakeries around here.

It's important to remember that, while Germany is about the size of one of the US's states, it's much more densely populated and has vast differences in customs, traditions and subtile social norms like cash vs cashless.

But most seriously, cash payments enable tons of tax fraud, especially by business owners in the hospitality industry, making it unfair to those with jobs who pay nearly half their salary in tax, while Gastro owners will buy another Porsche or vacation home from the taxes they dodged thanks to cash payments.

I hope they ban cash, it's annoying, time wasting, environmentally unfortunately and makes life super easy for tax fraudsters to the detriment of those who have to pay their taxes fairly.

The privacy reason is some hypocritical bullshit, as those same people using exclusively cash, carry privacy invasive Apple/Android phones and constantly use spying services of Google, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Snapchat, etc. The real "privacy" they're referring to means privacy from the taxman for their illicit financial gains, a.k.a. tax fraud. That's the real reason, and I hope it gets cracked down.

Plus conservative population that is skeptical about new tech and strongly keeps outdated ways of working and doing business (visible in any company there). Letters are common as well and digitalization is pretty weak.

Like what's the last tech product you remember that came out of Austria?

I have a friend who lives in a small village of roughly 3k people. If you step out of her backyard, you step into a winefield. You have to close the windows when they're fertilizing the fields nextdoor with dung.

I can reach her in half an hour plus three minute walk with trains that go every 15 minutes (half-hourly after 8pm, hourly after midnight).

Somehow this is possible all over the world, except in the US where it just an inevitable impossibility, just the way things are. I dare say, the people who are actually in a bubble here are the North Americans who have never seen or lived in a city that is anything except a square mile of skyscrapers surrounded by an endless sea of car-dependent single family houses and desolate concrete parking lots.

I was lucky, since I lived in town, but my childhood friends would come to school by bus. It took them 3h to get here, the motorist had to cover all the tiny villages along the way, and time adds up. If we didn't have those buses (most of them were vans), well then, I don't think most kids would get their lessons.

Who had cars though? No problem.

But yeah, it's difficult to employ a system on a rural area.

Maybe build quality of the assembly, but definitely not the build quality of anything mechanical! Modern cars have ludicrously better reliability than anything from the 60's to 80's. A car not making it to 100k miles is a rare exception these days, even with somewhat abusive upkeep.

Agreed, we should do it for the quality of life benefits.

The climate fix is a bonus...

Sure there are some ideas that EVs which don't see too much use could be used to discharge back into the grid, but that is hard to organize and destroys the battery much more quickly.

The big question is politics: even in cities where many people use transit, the political class favors cars.

1. Shops/bars/cafes/etc in residential areas.

2. The replacement of existing housing stock with multiple residences.