mike47

These guys are accountants:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-58025876

One idea might be to speak to a home security/burglar alarm company. I've had alarms retro-fitted to a couple of houses in the UK and both times the installers were very creative in routing the cables almost invisibly. (There were inevitably one or two stretches that could not be hidden).

If you have to run cables over the surface of the walls, can you box them in and redecorate the boxwork? Can you run the horizontal cables through coving around the edges of the ceilings?

The changes in fuel economy mentioned in that article don't seem that big. On the other hand, if an electric car only needed batteries for a range of say 50km, that would be a large saving in cost and weight. The batteries are only needed for local journeys, and the thrust carriage mechanism provides almost all of the energy for long journeys.

It would probably require electrically driven thrust carriages rather than pneumatic - you would need one for every car using the system. Trucks might need 2 or 3 or more to provide enough thrust. If a magnetic coupling really works, it would be possible to attach and detach from the thrust carriage at motorway intersections without slowing down any more than cars do at the moment.

The idea of a magnetic coupling between the engine and the passenger compartment is very interesting. This could be adapted to use with self-driving automobiles on highways. They could run on their own electric power train for local journeys, then pick up a "thrust carriage" when joining a highway. This pulls them along until their exit, when they decouple and return to using their battery and on-board motors. The on-board motors could also take over for short sections for example between different thrust carriage runs.

Perhaps the thrust carriage control systems could be made smart so they automatically maintain safe spacing between vehicles and adapt their speed to the volume of traffic. They'd communicate with the vehicle to tell them when the coupling was about to end so that the vehicle can engage its own drive train to take over smoothly. Or the vehicle's self-driving systems tell the thrust carriage how fast to go depending on the traffic conditions.

This could massively extend the range of electric cars. Burying the pipes in the road network would obviously be very expensive, but the size mentioned in the article (12 inch diameter) is not prohibitive.

She did!

Don't knock it 'til you've tried it ;-)

Do you mean that many (most?) online banking sites use JS? Based on my bank's online system, I don't think there is anything that could not be done without scripts. And my suggestion (perhaps not well expressed) is that someone (e.g. the banks themselves) develop a cut-down extra secure browser for use exclusively with online banking websites. I am assuming that the majority of online banking is done from customers' own home computer or tablet; obviously this idea won't help people logging on via a shared public PC.

I found the advice from Leo Babauta of zenhabits.net helped me quite a lot - particularly his book "The Power of Less". Basically, he advocates reducing other commitments and focussing all of your energy on a small number of projects (e.g. 3) and only starting something new when they are ALL finished. Easier said that done, of course, but I do finish things more frequently now...