Gas shortage UK

[alan_m]

Yep, we could get our power from Putin's wind farms.

[Frank]

Saw a video yesterday that OPEC's dropping output by just 2% caused a lot of the price rise. If our asshole in charge would take the throttle off US production price would fall considerably. Unfortunately the greenies own him.

[Commander Kinsey]

Greenies are a pest and should be gassed.

[John Larkin]

Girls make the experience even better.

Do you calculate steering and braking forces as you drive?

In engineeering new ideas are usually qualitative and subconscious. May as well get them while you're asleep. Ideas only need analysis (classic math or simulation) once they exist. Good quantity instincts will usually disqualify really bad ideas before you wake up.

[Commander Kinsey]

Plenty space over there, fill the barren unfarmable land to the north with wind farms.

[Commander Kinsey]

I tend to drive 20 year old cars, so you're probably on newer designs. Also I mistreat them, driving them at the limit (of the car, not the law).

And if it's a Volvo engine, you double everything anyway.

[Commander Kinsey]

Shivering girls are even better.

No, my point exactly. I use instincts as you said.

Indeed. And always have something to write down stuff as soon as you wake up, especially if like me you wake up multiple times in the night. I've been known to remember 6 different dreams by morning. The craziest one was placing a bet on Ladbrokes online. I then did so the next day and won the same £100 as in the dream. But calculating the odds, I should have lost several hundred.

[John Larkin]

I have to write ideas down at 3 AM, or I'll forget them.

Of course, if you do that it's too often obvious in the light of day how crazy the ideas were. But we embrace all ideas, even the crazy ones.

I never remember dreams. I suppose I have them. I do have hallucinations, which are different. They are fun.

[John Larkin]

I was shocked this morning, driving to work. I saw a Volvo that was not outright ugly.

[rbowman]

The P1800 wasn't bad for its time and place. The PV series had a certain pre-war charm. Too bad they were built post-war when the rest of the world had moved on.

A friend had a Healey 3000 that was stolen so he replaced that with another 3000. That was also stolen. He'd had enough of that shit and bought a Volvo. It was also stolen but that one was recovered with minor damage.

They'll steal anything in Boston; Volvos, hot stoves, elections...

[John Larkin]

Nobody stole my Ford Fiesta.

[Commander Kinsey]

Same here. I have a torch and a notepad and pen next to my bed.

Crazy is always fun and often surprisingly correct.

Look up Novadreamer.

Does this require ingestion of mushrooms?

[Commander Kinsey]

Cars serve a purpose, they are not meant to look pretty. Do you own an Apple device by any chance?

[Commander Kinsey]

I buy the cheapest car which is in working order, keep it for 5 years, then scrap it when it won't go. This means nobody steals it, I pay virtually nothing in depreciation (especially as the scrap value is often a third of the original purchase price, and I can often take parts out of it to sell first). My current car doesn't even lock. Nobody has ever stolen anything out of it, despite leaving satnav, mobile phone, and several tools in the back.

Don't get me started on electric cars, they just aren't worth the expense. If you can charge them for free (certain government run car parks, but how long will that last?), you can save money, but you still have a huge initial outlay.

[Commander Kinsey]

My dad's petrol Volvo was at 260K when he sold it, with the engine running perfectly.

[John Larkin]

Often the path to a great idea is through a region of crazy ideas. Rejecting ideas too soon blocks that path. The issue is, how do you explore a basically infinite solution space? You sure can't do that consciously, one idea at a time.

This is cool,

presenting the concept that our frontal cortexes are prissy censors of new ideas. Stop thinking and invent something!

No. I have very brief, a second or two, extremely brilliant and beautiful and colorful still images, usually a place (a little english village for example) or a woman's face. One reason I like them is because I have mediocre vision, but the hallucinations are optically perfect. I wish I had more.

I've read that over 20% of the population has hallucinations, but most people have acoustic ones.

[John Larkin]

Some are designed to be agressively ugly. There seems to be a niche market for ugly.

None.

[rbowman]

Miles or kilometers? Which leads to the question of how you can put 260K on anything on a little island.

[rbowman]

They screwed up and showed an Audi rather than the Golf R, but that's the sort of treatment my latest Yaris has. I had a second generation that looked decent. This is a third generation that started getting ugly. The fourth and final restyling attempt was worse. Topping them all for sheer ugly was the GR Yaris.

A 1500cc engine doesn't need a grille the size of a barn door.

[rbowman]

I lean towards epiphenomenalism. All that fancy inner dialogue is noise from the real work. The trace on an o-scope isn't the signal.

As far as alcohol, I once got into a barroom conversation with a tech rep who was calling on a local defense contractor. During the course of the evening I roughed out a design for an electronic ignition system for something live the Vulcan. It must have been good because he contacted me the next day and offered to set up an interview. I passed since I only had the vaguest idea of what sort of smoke I'd been blowing.

It would have been an interesting project. Electrical primers are nothing new. Germany was using them during WWII in aircraft weapons but there still is the mechanical component of the 'firing pin' making contact with the primer.