Are you labouring under the misapprehension that the sun doesn’t shine in the winter? That sounds like fossil fuel industry FUD…
Look, why - national stereotypes notwithstanding - are you apparently incapable of saying “oh, right, I don’t realise that, I understand that comparisons with Germany are not particularly useful, but I hope they find a way to make it work”, instead of endlessly doubling down on your pig-headed ignorance?
National stereotypes notwithstanding.
Yes, I absolutely have understood that. I also understand that that means the assumptions that a ring main are built on - that the distribution of load around the ring will be even in relation to the supply point - no longer apply.
In a ringmain, any individual stretch of the inwall wiring is under-rated. A single two-gang wall socket (with 2 perfectly legal and standard compliant 13A fused appliances/multisockets plugged in) can draw more current then the cable in the wall is rated for. It is “safe” because it relies on the current being drawn, on average, equally from both sides of the ring. If you plug a generator in that is closer to the socket, that is no longer true - more current will be drawn on the shorter path to the generator than the longer path back to the fuse box. An already marginal system is now unsafe.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, and I hope it will be done, but it works in Gemany is a fucking stupid comment that we keep seeing but is irrelevant because Germany (and almost everywhere else on Earth) has a completely different domestic electrical system.
Then you’re an idiot.
I suspect Instagram has done more to encourage custom silicone than the iPhone, tbh.
“That system” was not “designed for electric heaters” (I have no idea where this ridiculous myth comes from, ) it was designed to cut costs because copper was expensive after the war.
In-plug fuses do not make it safe, they help mitigate two critical flaws: the first, that a faulty appliance can draw 32A through a 13A cable without blowing the distribution fuse, and secondly (relevant to this case) they make it harder - but not impossible - to unbalance the ring by plugging too much load into a single socket.
But it’s only a mitigation, it doesn’t make it safe. A standard two-gang wall plate on its own is all that is required to overload the inwall wiring (26A from two sockets on a 24A feed protected by a 32A breaker.) Adding 4A of feed-in as well is a significant bump to the risk of an already unsafe system.
And sure, nobody is going to notice the problem on day 1, and as long as the only electrical appliances you use are mobile phone chargers there is never going to be a problem. But a while down the line when the householder decides to plug in a couple of the new AC units they feel they can now justify because they’re powering them off solar, whose maximum draw just happens to coincide with maximum solar production, that’s when the smoke will come…
(And that’s ignoring the ubiquitous DIY’d spur off the ring for the conservatory or extension, or the accidentally broken ring when someone replaced a wallbox and now they actually have two 24A radials on a 32A fuse - all far from uncommon in any UK house that ever had a home improvement nut living in it.)
A fifty percent increase in the margin for failure, you say?
Oh well, that’s fine then. No need for concern.
Everyone doing the “it works in Germany” dance needs to remember that the UK, almost uniquely, has ring main domestic wiring, which presents unique safety challenges.
(Specifically, in-wall wiring that is under-rated compared to the fuse that protects it (e.g. 24A wall wiring on a 32A fuse), which is only safe if the ring is in-tact (no undetected breaks) and, critically for this application, the load is evenly distributed around the ring.)
Yes, it can and should be made to work - but it is not as straightforward as “herp derp works in Germany so yolo”.
It’s only regressive when framed as a tax on consumers - which is of course easier to do in a ridiculous country that allows retailers to advertise prices without all the retailer’s costs included.
A properly organised VAT type tax is not regressive - it’s a tax on corporations that buy product for cents and then sell them on for dollars, pocketing the difference. I’ve no idea why sales taxes bring out this “but won’t somebody think of the corporations!” handwringing.
Do they actually teach Geography in US schools? Or were you homeschooled?
Clue: If I chose to “pop over” to Paris for lunch, it would be a 22 hour drive with no breaks, or more plausibly, a 3 hour flight. I have done it by train, but that’s still a couple of overnight trains (one night to Vienna, one more to say Frankfurt or Brussels, and then a few more hours on to Paris.)
What you’re really whining about is “we surrendered all power to an electoral system that concentrates all the power somewhere thousands of miles away, and in the hands of a man elected by something so far from democracy it’s laughable”. Which is very much on you, not geography.
Quite; I just set a (locally hosted) LLM off writing the tickets for implementing all the opcodes in a simple device emulator, based on grovelling through datasheets and documentation. Whether the tickets get implemented by an AI or a human, it’s a timesaver having the AI do it, and the tickets will be better written than I would have done.
Everyone railing against this also overlooks the reality of professional software development: professional software is developed 5% by skilled, trained Software Engineers, and 95% by code monkeys who shotgun copypasta from Stack Overflow until it works. Even if we extremely generously assume that the hardcore “never use AI” Lemmy brigade are in the 5% (and not, more likely the 95% drowning in their own Dunning Kruger,) the “but AIs produce unreadable code and make mistakes” threat isn’t putting off anyone who’s ever actually had to hire a significantly sized development team.
Upvoting mainly for the exotic sight of a diaeresis outside the New Yorker.
A definite touch of class. Bravo.
Neat; sounds like a combination of traditional processing units, with FPGA-style reprogrammable logic for interconnection between them. I’m sold :^).