practicemaths

If you build more housing, especially more affordable, then housing prices start to go down and that makes banks and landowners unhappy.

What about second-life use though for lithium batteries in grid storage?

We're building a lot of EVs right now. Pretty much any battery has hard to process material in it. Packs for vehicles last between 5-15 years, but there's still a lot of energy storage capacity left.

You reduce the amount of processing & mining needed AND make EVs more affordable if you can extend the life of the battery pack beyond just it's automotive application by giving it another life in grid storage.

Yeah but then Russia could not have sold them as much oil & gas.

Yes, you're a vanguard for moral authority while actively also making what-about-x excuses for Russia.

Which has openly broken any established rules of war along with raping & genital mutilation being an actively encouraged tactic.

Actually, why would it be low? Dispatch? Accounting? Automatically handling invoices?

There's plenty of reasons why a tow-truck company may want a server.

Regardless, clearly I was talking about a tow-truck company buying a tow-truck and not a server, as I was trying to convey that the dollar amount isn't obscene for a small business to handle.

As I am sure you're aware from your stated field of work that far more money than $2.5k is going into tools & such.

Nothing with regards to my comment was to suggest that the service one would be paying for here is worth that money. Maybe it is or isn't, that not I was commenting on.

It is purely that X amount of money was not unreasonable for a small business to expect to expense.

I think the EU can & may be doing both.

AFIK, at least a few countries & research entities over there are using FOSS, at least in part, as well as promoting it.

Hypothetically just because a Government is using FOSS to operate does not mean a company can not still break antitrust rules.

A price conscious consumer will not purchase this then.

I am confused at what the issue here is then.

The business presumably set their price for their target audience. If that price is too high then you are not the target audience.

"Pricing starts at a reasonable $25 per server/instance per year, with a minimum $2,500 investment required."

So is it 100 server minimum or is it $2,500 upfront plus $25 per year after that for a single server/instance?

Are you saying that $2500 is an unreasonable amount for a small business to invest in itself or let alone within startup costs?

If I started a tow-truck company, that would be a small business. I would also expect to invest more than $2500 into my tow-truck.

I trust a tangible analogy should be sufficient to get my point across.

Is this a one time expense or continuously yearly?

The pricing description in the article wasn't making that clear to me.

Regardless, $2500 is more than reasonable write off expense for startup costs in almost any sector a "small-business" may operate in.

100k is more than a believable amount of revenue for a small business to have.

How is $2,500 not a reasonable expense for a small business?

Battery technology starts at the cell. It's far easier to build a small cell and test it's chemistry than it is to build a large (in comparison) battery.

Price of branding I imagine.

People are willing to pay the price so you may as well charge as much until sale revenue goes down.

Also it just looks like fun Engineering. You get to tear apart a whole machine down to every last nut screw and bolt. Then itemize it and approximate the cost to produce.

It's very neat I got to see some of this process during a tour of an auto engineering facility.

It might happen! There's a fair bit of active research into repurposing batteries from cars into such a purpose or similar.

This both extends the usefulness of the manufactured good (the battery) while also hopefully lowering the upfront costs of new electric cars.

If a car does that then it's not safe to merge until after they've gotten ahead of you.

"brake so i can merge behind them"

This is how you're supposed to merge. When you get on the freeway you don't expect the current flow of traffic to accommodate for you, instead you accommodate for them.

"it really feels to me like your comments are meant to needle my complaint re: folks not understanding the zipper merge, am i misreading you? do you think the zipper merge should not be used?"

I am not sure you're understanding how it's supposed to work... People in the flowing lane aren't meant to stop or slow down to let you over.

The zipper action is meant when it's backed up. The zipper lane isn't designed for you to disrupt the current flow of traffic.

Edit: here's a video, maybe it will help you understand better

https://youtu.be/I2Rd8z_VHpE?si=C4nmWqQpL7aaydQI

Technically yes. Humans are biological creatures.

Oh, so you end up with space to merge easily then if they're speeding up.

If there isn't a gap then don't force a merge. Otherwise you're the one driving unsafely and causing further traffic congestion.

Your comment makes less sense when the merging lane has no one else it as well. That means the car in it that is merging over has plenty of opportunities to merge safely without causing traffic congestion however they don't.

You design systems for the way nature works not how you wish nature worked ideally.

If there is an appropriate gap it is fine. However in my experience many people in the zipper lane merge without regard to what the traffic in the lane they're merging into is doing. Thus forcing people to slam on breaks and slows down the overall flow of traffic.

So that sounds like a massive flaw in traffic management design.

It's more efficient to develop traffic rules that work in how people are not how they should ideally be.

Well if you're forcing them to break when you merge then that kind of requires a finger imo.

Regardless Columbus has a great lack of turn signals and understanding of basic intersection rules.

That it lead to the pickling of his liver?

I wonder how much alcoholism contributed to it here though.

That's for maximizing energy efficiency. Tankless I think might be a tad bit more easier and cheaper to implement than this.

Regardless the point is eliminating the use of natural gas in heating water is itself a benefit.

What about tankless water heaters? You can eliminate greenhouse gas emissions for heating and be more efficient with energy usage overall.

I'm going to assume when you say not very impactful to humanity that you mean in a physical sense that it doesn't significantly change our environment directly because of it.

Certainly has had an impact on humanity in a cultural sense.

So if this type of technology results in less civilian casualties this is a good thing right?