Yaztromo @ Yaztromo @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.

At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.

The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.

At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.

EVs need at least 30 minutes with the fastest charger to get from say 20 to 60 right? In either case they take up the bay. So you need to be able to handle many more at once.

No. The Hyundai IONIQ 5 and 6 (and likely 7) only need 18 minutes to go from 10% to 80%.

The certainty the Federal Government recently gave automakers concerning Canada’s EV future has massively helped this sort of deal to be possible.

It should certainly make it more difficult for a Conservative government to come in and remove the EV rules — although history does show we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that they’ll be happy to scrap deal like this and the battery plants to fit ideological goals in Alberta (burn baby burn).

Well, non-polluting passenger vehicles are happening, and here in Canada by 2035 all passenger vehicles sold will (at a minimum) need to be PHEVs that can travel up to 80km on a single battery charge.

Unless of course idiot voters bring in a Conservative government, and they remove the certainty the Liberal government has given automakers around EV sales in Canada.

You can’t have public transportation that takes everyone everywhere they need (or want) to be. Ever order food delivery? You can’t do that by bus or train. Would you expect the Presidential motorcade to switch to getting on a subway? Do you expect every plumber, electrician, landscaper, and handyman who needs a van or truck to haul their equipment from home to home to do repairs just bring 10 guys on the bus with them?

We’ll still need passenger vehicles, full stop. Should we design cities and transit so that we need less of them? Sure — but it’s impossible to replace all of them, as public-option transport just can’t do everything we use passenger vehicles for today. Public transit is only about moving people, but sometimes those people need to drag equipment around with them, or need additional security, or have need to go somewhere where dedicated transit options aren’t financially viable — and for those cases, we still need non-polluting passenger vehicles.

It’s not an either-or situation; we’ll always need a mix of transit capabilities.

Besides which, transit has many of the same issues, and benefits from the same technologies. We need to remove diesel and gas busses, trams, and trains from the roads as well, often using much the same technologies the anti-EV crowd puts down passenger EVs for.

Everything I stated for why EVs are better for the environment goes for electric driven public transit too.

My daughters school (in Canada) uses several. They’re not only quiet, but they’re not spewing gas/diesel fumes where kids are standing around when loading, especially in the winter. They’re not at 100% electrification yet, but they appear to have around 50% of the busses as EVs.

Nice for the local residents too, as they’re much quieter running and up down the residential streets around the school.

There is an environmental cost to nearly everything — but the cost for virtually everything related to EVs is significantly less than those of ICE vehicles, especially in a country like Canada where over 80% of our electricity is from hydroelectric sources, and over 90% of it is from non-carbon-emitting sources.

Yes, the batteries (today) need lithium. That’s not likely to be true moving into the future — China is already releasing an 2024 model based on a sulphur battery. However, what many people (and this article) conveniently ignore is that ICE vehicles use rare-earth metals as well. For example, very ICE vehicle uses palladium (one of the rarest metals on earth) for the catalytic converter — a rare earth metal not required in EV production. And Russia produces 40% of the global supply of palladium.

And oil refining uses cobalt as part of the de-sulphuring process. A lot of cobalt. Over its lifetime the average ICE vehicle will use more cobalt than any EV being manufactured today.

EV batteries are recyclable — up to 95% recyclable. But even before disposal is needed, used EV batteries can be repurposed — Nissan in Japan already resells Leaf batteries with >80% capacity as home backup and camping power packs, and elsewhere in the world used EV batteries are finding a new life as solar power generation storage. Sourcing lithium from used EV batteries cells is vastly more economical than mining for new lithium, so we’ll likely hit a steady-state where only minimal mining is required for new EVs. EV battery recycling is somewhat nascent right now as the oldest EVs are barely 12 years old, and many of those are still on the road.

The worries about the environmental cost of EVs is vastly overstated — especially when you set them side-by-side with ICE vehicles. Anyone who unabashedly drives an ICE vehicle but then complains about how polluting EVs are is being completely disingenuous.

An indirect sequel that used the same sets and cast (where it makes sense) dealing with the Demon Core could be interesting - but I don’t know if there would be enough there for a full feature-length film or not.

And? I’ve never seen anyone anywhere argue otherwise. Even the original CBC article pointed that out pretty clearly.

(Although I’ll point out the Piapot First Nation has recently come out to say her name isn’t on their membership role, so apparently the claims there are highly tenuous).

The problem isn’t that Ms. St.-Marie claims to be native because she was adopted as an adult not a native community — it’s that she has claimed for decades that she was a 60s scoop survivor, born on a Canadian reservation and adopted by white parents — none of which is true. She’s changed her story about her heritage multiple times, at times claiming she knew and visited her indigenous birth mother regularly, and other ties (like now) claiming she doesn’t know who her indigenous birth mother is. She’s claimed to have been from multiple tribes — all before being adopted as an adult into the Piapot First Nation family.

If I had been adopted as an adult by a black family, that wouldn’t give me the right to go around claiming I was a runaway slave from the pre-Civil War southern US, who came to Canada via the Underground Railroad. Ms. St.-Marie doesn’t (and shouldn’t) get a pass for her lies.

She isn’t native by heritage — and that is what she’s been lying about for decades, and that is what people have a problem with. If she “feels” native by adult adoption she just had to say so, and not lie about her actual heritage for the last 50+ years.

While I still think that Hyundai engineering and design did some real magic with the IONIQ 5, I just can’t help but feel like the rest of the company is just screwing the pooch on this car. They’ve flooded the US market with models people there don’t seem to want to buy, and dealership lots often have a dozen or more waiting to be sold.

Meanwhile, here in Canada buying one is damn near impossible. That doesn’t seem to stop them from sending out mass marketing materials and ads trying to sell them (or the IONIQ 6), mind you — I just wish they had focussed first on ensuring their biggest boosters globally were getting the cars they want, as opposed to putting lots of cars nobody seems to want on US dealership lots.

(FWIW, my dealership told me they weren’t being allowed by Hyundai to order any 2023 IONIQ 5s. This seems to be a fairly common occurrence across all dealerships here in Canada, with just a few cars trickling in each month).

Meanwhile, up here in Canada I put a down payment on an IONIQ 5 Ultimate Edition (Canadian equivalent of the US ‘Limited’ model) back in early April 2022, and it still hasn’t been ordered, because Hyundai decided to flood the US market while stiffing the Canadian market.

Hyundai (and other EV makers) are fucking around, and then blaming the market.

Don’t get me wrong — I wasn’t saying it’s a good idea. But absent any fancy technology it’s not entirely impossible to plant fast growing trees, harvest them, and then bury them in a mine or at the bottom of a hypoxic body of water.

It would certainly have to be a global, multi-generational undertaking. But it looks like that’s going to be the case with every other solution as well.

Trees also don’t really sequester carbon for long. They die, and the carbon gets eaten by organisms and the cycle continues. Or it burns and most of the carbon is released instantly and only ash remain.

Unless humans get involved and harvest and sequester the tree remains themselves.

McDonald's for years really stepped up their coffee game.

McDonalds found themselves in a weird place in the 90’s. Drive-throughs were tremendously successful, to the point where they had massive amounts of real estate that was primarily empty inside. People weren’t eating in as much, and so the dining rooms were empty.

Hence refurbishments and the introduction of McCafe — the whole point of which was to encourage more people to come in and use the dining rooms (and by sticking around, maybe buy more stuff than they would if they just came through the drive through). It’s why they introduced baked goods and mini doughnuts — back in the 80’s the only “baked goods” you’d get were apple pies and boxes of prepackaged mini cookies. Coffee and baked goods were the driver to get people to sit inside the restaurants more often — and if you go to any McDonalds in Canada in an area with a decent number of retirees, I’d say it seems to have worked.

I suggested to a friend years ago that he keep all of hit used butts in a jar beside his bed. He came up with this idea that he should add some water to the jar.

The reminder every time he got up or went to bed that the black goop shit was the same stuff he was putting into his lungs every day eventually got him to stop. He couldn’t even look at the jar anymore — and certainly didn’t want to add to it. That thing was nasty.

Hyundai

I want an EV.

I have the money for an EV.

I put a down payment on an EV back in April 2022.

It still hasn’t been ordered, because the manufacturer won’t permit the dealership to order any, and is barely shipping any to Canada, even though they advertise it as their flagship EV.

Meanwhile, lots in the US are full of unsold units.

I want an EV.

I have the money for an EV.

I put in my order for my EV in early 2022.

I am still waiting on my EV to be ordered, nevermind manufactured and delivered.

But if that’s really how you feel, you likely wouldn’t be running Windows (and hence be stuck with Edge as your default browser) in the first place.