The thing about fuel taxes is you pay based on how much you drive. More drive, more fuel, more taxes. And I'm sure you don't drive all that many miles every year. But, what about someone that drives their EV 2x what you do. Which causes 2x the road wear and tear that you do. Is a flat tax fair to you?
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A serious question. Are you paying a road tax to drive on the roads with your EV yet? In the US, some states are now starting to look into how to charge EV owners a road use tax. ICE cars pay that tax at the pump and the more you drive, the more tax you pay. EV owners that charge at home, (and who wouldn't do that), currently pay no road taxes because they buy no or very little "fuel".
I'm interested to know what the states think is a fair tax amount. Particularly since EV owners tend to be wealthier than most people. And what EV owners think of paying such a tax.
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Games are mostly just applied maths with pretty colors.
As an old toolmaker, Welcome to the world of understanding your process! And knowing the limits of that process.
I wonder what he actually expects for a tolerance day to day. A +/-.1mm IS doable if you're careful. But there is enough randomness in the FDM process, even outside the slicer, that I wouldn't bet the farm on any 1 random piece hitting that tolerance. Let alone repeating that level of tolerance every time over say, 100 parts.
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For a good while now I just felt old. But not today. Today I feel fucking old.
Two weeks ago I had an MRI to see if I need knee surgery. Tomorrow I get to talk to Ortho about my impending knee surgery-- A lateral tear of the meniscus in the cleft with some degeneration of the joint. I'm sick of walking with a cane and wearing a knee brace.
Saturday I drove 360 some miles to get an MRI to see if I have prostate cancer. No results yet, but I have my suspicions based on my PSAs. The question is: Is it the slow cancer or the fast cancer?
Thursday I need to drive another 100 miles to talk to another doctor about what is now a very minor issue.
So yeah, I'm mother fucking old today.......
***Oh, and yes I remember Bardot vividly from my youth. And a host of others you may or not remember. From Marilyn Monroe to Jane Russel to Maureen O'Hara.
As I know from reading various outside sources and have heard, there have been NO actual fires reported and verified caused by the NTC failure in question. Just some scorch marks and a bit of localized melting.
This does not mean that a fire is impossible, but that you would need to have an exceptionally bad day for the fire resistant plastic of the housing and board to catch fire.
This issue does not affect the mini. That's a different control board. I own a mini.
What you are thinking of is the NTC thermistor that was failing. That part was meant to limit the inrush current when the nozzle was rapidly heating. Its failure will just stop the nozzle from working at all. Which is precisely what should happen at failure. It is suspected they either got a bad batch of NTC thermistors or they were pushing the inrush current too close to the max rating. Bambu replaced a fair number of control boards and took the hit for not addressing these failures by not recalling the affected batch and replacing the offending board.
The plastic housing of the printer is a fire-retardant, high-temp polymer. And as far as I have read and know from my following of the issue, there have been no reported and verified fires caused by this particular problem. Just some scorched plastic and a bit of localized melting with the blown NTC.
But there does remain a non-zero chance of a real fire because of bad NTC. But it needs to be ignited by dust or little bits of filament that invades every nook and cranny on every printer in existence. If it bothers you and you are worried, clean your A1's insides every year. Make it a routine maintenance thing.
Disclaimer: I do own an A1 mini (which is not affected by this issue). While my mini does exactly what I originally bought it for (before the ongoing attempt of Bambu to crash the plane), I'm under no illusion that Bambu is not a company I wish to support.
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I remember the beehive hairdos. True monuments to structural engineering that would make any architect spiral into a pit of inadequacy.
Chamber pressures for the 5.56 Nato is 58,000psi. And 9mm is 35,000psi. It takes a pretty good piece of pipe to contain those pressures. Your average seam welded pipe is around 4000 to maybe 10,000 psi.
Zip guns made from hardware store pipe are just barely good enough to contain a low pressure 12ga bird shot shell.
I mean, if you ain't drowning in it, are you really working? And if you are, you should get off your ass and work harder so we can drop more work on you!
There is no real way to know about telemetry until they really get out in the wild. But, I wouldn't think it will have much because of the minimalist design and approach to marketing. It also helps there is just one model that can be either a 2 door pickup or an SUV with some extra bolt on parts and only one paint color-- body wraps extra. And I think they have hit the sweet spot in battery options. You can get the standard 150-mile pack or the 240-mile pack. Most urban dwellers would be just fine with the standard 150 range. While still giving those of us that live in rural areas the ability to have just enough extra range to make those longer round trips we often need to drive.
I think the biggest thing they have done is to re-imagine just what customers want and how to actually manufacture it. It's a throw-back idea about not selling expensive packages for multiple models, but one model that comes just one color. But you can choose to add things, or not, as you want them. And they, so far, want the customer to have the power to repair or add items and do the work themselves.
As I said, I do suspect the majority of Slates sold will be $30,000+US due to the pretty clever old school marketing method of letting customers choose what to factory install when ordering. A very good way to get people to over spend on wants and not real needs. The profit margins on installing radios is a lot less than letting the customer upsell themselves on those fancy rims and aggressive tires.
It's a bold experiment in the automotive industry in the US. I think it can work and work well. There is a huge gap in the automotive market at the low end price range that simply isn't being exploited. Slate can be the one to stake a claim to it.
The only one I can think of is the Slate. But they aren't quite ready to open the doors to buyers just yet. They do claim manufacturing to start late this year. Though you can reserve a build for $50. They claim base price in the mid US$20K. Though I would think most will sell out the door for $30K to $35K when you start adding all the customizations most will go for.
I have hopes for Slate.
An application of hair dry heat will make the white marks go away.
No, the requirements aren't that low. But there are levels of nursing. Each requiring different levels of education and licensing. From LPN, Licensed Practical Nurse the entry level that takes about a year, to RN, Registered Nurse, can take 2 to 4 years. A 4 year BS degree is a degreed RN. Then you can continue to other licensing degrees like RN-P, Registered Nurse Practitioner-- with a limited doctor scope of medicine to take the pressure off of General Practitioner doctors. And a host of specialties nurses can go into. With median wages around $90,000US. And easy opportunities to earn well over $100,00US per year.
Much of the staffing issues centers around many nurses wanting to only work 20 to 25 hours a week. I have a friend that was head of a nursing department in a hospital for many years, and she was always complaining that she couldn't get nurses to work more than 30 hours a week. And most refused to work more than 25 hours.
It's a start. It may take time to make it work for "everyday" use, but if it's possible now, it can be done better in the future.
Yeah, you've been lazy along with me. I wanted another one of their shaving brushes. I think they still offer badger hair shaving brushes. For real natural brushes you have your choice of either badger hair or boar bristle. Badger is the most popular for shaving brushes followed by boar which is stiffer and can feel "scritchier" if you are looking for that. Though it takes a bit of use to get a good boar brush's bristles to start splitting at the tips and then it provides a soft feel.
Those people that dislike the fact that the boar and badger need to be all in on making a shaving brush, favor the synthetics. And I do have a couple that I find pretty nice. But there is a difference in the feel between natural hair/bristle and plastic.
My understanding of history and pacifists, (which may or not be right), is that no pacifist movement has ever "won" a revolution by peaceful means themselves. It always takes a group of people who are willing to use violence and die in the process if need be to achieve the desired ends to back the pacifists up.
Popular modern peaceful movements led by people such as Martin Luther King in the US and Ghandi in colonial India were parallel backed by violent groups such as the Black Panthers in the US and a bunch of small and very active violent groups in India.
And the only reason we know and remember Ghandi and King and hold them up as shining examples of pacifism, is because the powers that be decided it was easier and more beneficial to negotiate with them rather than the more violent factions. After all, that could get you killed outright trying to negotiate with the violent leaders or at least totally ousted from power at best. Dealing with the pacifists was a good way to stay alive and maintain at least some power if not all of it. But until those in power are convinced they can die because enough of the population is actively trying to kill them, they don't much care about talking to the pacifists. I mean, what are they going to do? Carry signs and march for a few days? Oh! The horror! If that worked, Trump would be in jail by now.
Until enough of the populace is angry enough to take up arms and risk death to kill those evil people in power, nothing will change. There will be no reason to make deals or vacate the power for the pacifists to occupy.
But there still remains the problem of the violent people the pacifists now need to deal with. And those people have the taste of blood. This is the weak point in any revolution.....
Yes, every time a horse needs to be groomed, it's a death sentence for them. Well, some horses think they coulda' had died. It coulda' happened that way you know. But they all somehow survive.
Interestingly enough, or not, at one time horse hair was the most popular material to make all kinds of brushes out. There were millions of horses, and they all needed to have their manes and tails groomed and cut several times a year. So there was a renewable and never ending supply. People were happy, and the horses were happy.
But, then came WW1. And along with all the guns, artillery, and ammunition needed to feed these engines death and destruction, copious amounts of other far more mundane items were also required by soldiers. And one of those mundane items were shaving brushes.
Soldiers are required to shave every day no matter what. So that meant every solider needed a shaving kit. This meant the military needed to supply a razor, blades, shaving soap, and a shaving brush to every solider. And the cheapest and most abundant brush to buy in bulk, was horse hair. But there soon was a problem.
Turns out all that patriotic horses were being sent to war to get killed just like all the men. And that in the western world, horse hair quickly was in short supply. And the soldiers still needed shaving brushes.
So, the brush factories started importing horse hair brushes from the Far East, mainly China. And because the Chinese either didn't understand that horse hair needs to be sterilized, or it was just Chinese businessmen being Chinese, they skipped that step and didn't tell anyone. And soon soldiers were being infected with tetanus and dying at an alarming rate. It is one thing to send your soldiers to die in the face of machine-gun fire, and a whole 'nother thing to waste them dying from tetanus infected shaving brushes instead. So they panicked switched to boar bristle brushes instead.
And so great was the fear of cheap imported horse hair shaving brushes from the Orient, that the US passed a Federal law banning the importation of horse hair brushes or horse hair and even the manufacture of those brushes in the US. A prohibition that lasted until recently. Other nations enacted similar bans or implemented strict rules regarding in manufacture and sale. And so horse hair shaving brushes faded from consumers minds.
The last horse hair shaving brush manufacturer in the west, an old Spanish company-- Vie-Long, finally quit making them a few years ago now. (I own and regularly use 3 of them). So new horse hair shaving brushes are now extinct. And that includes the rare and heavily fetishized horse hair tooth brushes.
Fortunately, you can get synthetic shaving knots and tooth brushes that very good these days. And so people with those peculiar fetishes can continue their private kinks.
Obviously fuel taxes do not cover the whole cost of road maintenance, and they haven't for decades. Where are those EVs paying road use taxes beyond registration and license fees? The more you drive an ICE car, the more fuel tax you will pay. And that's fair. Shouldn't EVs pay for the mileage they drive on the roads too? Is it OK that an EV that doesn't drive many miles a year should pay the same flat tax/fee that another EV that gets driven 3x as many miles?
I'm all for EV use, I'd own one if I could afford one for sure. But the prices are a bar to ownership. In any case, states ARE looking into chiseling into the lost revenue that EVs are currently ducking. They want the revenue stream.