OT: EV Charging Stations Stripped of Copper Cables

Bill Sloman is a notorious Australian troll, so I wouldn't attempt to debate with him because if he starts to lose an argument he resorts to lies to save face. Speaking of notorious Australian trolls, does Rod Speed still post here?

Just you try trading one in!

Excuse me, Bill? ISTR *you're* the one who loves to boast and bask in the glory of having worked for some Cambridge based outfit at some time in the dim and distant past! And you got your degree at Sydney University which is hardly an Ivy League joint! :-D

Very wise of her. "I can't have everyone knowing I'm married to someone with such loony ideas, darling!" LOL!

That's an assertion, not evidence. You should have realised by now that you aren't any kind of reliable witness, and can inf act be relied on to pick the most fatuous lying propaganda around.

Boast? It was an eventful period, but there wasn't a lot of glory around.

Melbourne University. The "Ivy League" is a collection of eight American private universities

You do like to see the world in terms of pecking orders - anything more informative overloads your tiny brain.

She put it more in terms of being worried about getting targetted by the likes of you.

Though you may find this difficult to believe, you are the lunatic ideas merchant around here - not me - and my wife and I shared much the same political opinions. So do most of my and her professional colleagues.

You are the MAGA-hat wearing freak around here, despite your delusions of level-headedness.

At least that's something we *do* agree on! :-D

I'm afraid much as you egalitarian types would prefer otherwise, the fauna of the world evolved and continues to evolve according to a pecking order and to suggest otherwise flies in the face of both nature and reason. The world is a very unequal place. You 'Communitarian' types constantly deny this and dogmatically insist that all are equal, but that's far more compelling evidence for having a tiny brain than anything I've ever said!

Exactly. Nuclear waste.

Exactly Natuaral fission reacxtins creatng even more nuclear waste.

Any isotope with a half life of more than a few hundred years isn't very naturally radioactive.

That's the point the greentards™ cant grasp. If its going to be around thousands of years, its not very radioactive AT ALL.

Its used in te balance weighs on many airliners

Grandmother eggs suck

Precisely,. The longer it lasts the less dangerous it is,

The Greem Marxists love to conflate 'highly radioactive' 'lasts thousands of years' but its simply a propaganda lie.

That's what I have been saying. Stuff with a half life of a few hundred years is the problem, and a pyramid that works for 5000 years is plenty good enough

No idea. Been killfiled at least a decade

And you happen to be completely wrong, as usual. Stuff with a short half life is a particularly horrible threat, but you don't want environment contaminated with any of the longer lived stuff either - right out to Iodine-129 with it's 15.7 million year half-life.

Only an ignorant yokel like you could fail to see it as a threat.

For rather different reasons.

Pecking order is one area of competition. Evolution depends on having off-spring that survive to reproduce, so the capacity to get enough to eat comes into it too, amongst a whole lot of other things.

You clearly aren't up to that kind of reasoning, and like to simplify your life by leaving out the bits you have trouble comprehending.

A strange assertion. I've never asserted that "all are equal" and in fact tend to point out that the only people who even start off with identical genomes are identical twins, and even their geneomes don't stay identical much beyond conception.

You do seem to think that left-wingers insist that everybody is the same, but this isn't true.

The US Constitution does say "that all men are created equal" but it clearly didn't mean identical.

This does seem to be another of those complicated ideas that you can't actually comprehend.

That's good, even necessary, but it shouldn't supress the occasional excursion into absurdity, which is where ideas come from.

I was just talking to a guy who runs the electronics group at one of our US National Labs. He asked me what sort of stuff we do, and I said "lunatic fringe electronics." He laughed and said that's what he does too.

We agree that scientists present us with wonderful problems to instrument but are generally terrible at designing electronics themselves.

I was just reading some similar thoughts about ideas in a book by Freeman Dyson.

This supposed dichotomy between academic and pragmatic knowledge is false. Both are necessary Example 1. ======= We were developing a laser rangefinder for the Army, featuring fragile optics a ruby laser and a bloody expensive silicon photodiode. Try as we might we couldnt get more than just over a mile range from the lab roof to a white painted building about a mile away. One day a boffin with a tweed jacket and pipe came visiting, we explained our problem. "How much power is the laser?" "EWhat is te noise figure on the photodiode"? "I'll see whats what over lunch"

He came back later and sid - "Oh, well its not good news I am afraid, with that much power and that much front end noise you will be lucky to get a mile put of that with a nice reflective target" So we gave up, drained all the money out that projects budget and cancelled it.

Example 2 ======

I was tasked with designing amongst other things a FM Hifi receiver. To save time we imported a Japanese tuner head and I built the IF strip and detector. The customer was however German, and totally chauvinistic. No Japanese quality. We must have German or at least European, So we got a Philips head. At once we had massive hiss and hum. I didn't have time to track it diown so a consultant was briught on who spent a fortnight calculating the noise contribution of my IF strop and said 'well it doesn't seem to be that' 'I could have saved to two weeks of calculation' 'How so' 'Just pull the tuner out, put in a 10.7MHz signal into theh IF strip and look! No f****ng noise'

(It turned out that wunderbar German tuner head was a pile of crap. They had used a zener diode to stabilize the VCO without seeming to understand that a zener is an ideal noise source, and they had used ferrite slugs in the VCO which make marvellous detectors of magnetic fields. Germans are s*it engineers. They make up for it by testing and fiddling till stuff works. A nation of technicians)

The point here is that academic knowledge can eliminate solutions that

"Are you sure that beam will take the load of pulling an engine out of t forklift?" "we pulled a bigger one out with it last week"

Sounds like a German engineer that was in charge of a new instalation where I worked. We asked him for the settings on some instruments. He said 'we week it up and we tweak it down and when she runs , she runs.'

On a visit to the UK some years ago I went to the Science Museum in Kensington (or wherever it is). They had a Spitfire and a Messerschmit on one of the floors and each had cut-away engines. The Spitfire engine was of course a Rolls-Royce Merlin and the quality of the engineering was staggering. You didn't have to be an engineer to appreciate it. Beautifully polished components shining like mirrors. How the hell they produced workmanship like that in the middle of a major war is beyond me. It was superhuman. The German plane's engine was a pile of garbage in comparison; very crudely thrown together with poorly machined parts. Still, it did fair job I suppose, even though it couldn't match the performance of the Spitfire in the air.

Some Nazi bigwig saw a Merlin engine and announced that they would lose the war.

I think you misunderstood what he said (as usual) Bill. The kind of exposure is also highly relevant. Most notably ingestion as opposed to simple proximity to the source. You are aware - I assume - that different modes of radiation (eg. alpha, beta, gamma etc.) have different penetrative qualities and whilst lead is required to screen out some types, others can't even make it through skin.

Same here, hence the question. Just imagine all the time we've saved in not having to read and respond to his silly old nonsense.

You usually do. You don't understand much, and imagine that your own defective understanding justifies quite a bit of off-target rudeness.

The problem with the longer-lived radio-nucleotide is that they will still be dangerous long after our current civilisation is dead and forgotten. We can't predict who or what will get exposed to our radioactive waste, or how they might get exposed.

Burying it deep in some kind of geologically stable structure is the best we can do, and we still aren't actually doing it, some seventy years after we started generating high level radioative waste.

Obviously. I've had a technical education that does explicitly include that kind of information. I've even worked on electron microscopes which rely on beta-particles (electrons) as their illuminating mechanism.

If you knew what you were talking about, you'd know that, rather than having to "assume" it.

Jeez, Bill. I was only trying to be kind to you and you're attacking me for it! I don't think I'll ever understand you Communists.