• 0 Posts
  • 86 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle

  • Fwiw mining and manufacturing isn’t as bad as some people want you to believe.

    About 40% of lithium comes from brine extraction. There’s a lot of lithium in the ground which are dissolved in brine - a super salty solution of minerals and water. They’re extracted by allowing the water to evaporate into the atmosphere and then retrieving the minerals from that.

    While that “wastes” a lot of water, none of that water was usable in the first place. It’s too salty for humans and would kill any plants or fish if used for crops or dumped respectively.

    Another 60% comes from normal hard rock mining. This is as environmentally friendly as most mining is.

    A small portion - about 2% - comes from clay mining. This is actually rather bad for the environment and results in a lot of atmospheric pollution. Fortunately, it’s a small shrinking portion of total mining.

    The other main minerals in li-ions are cobalt, manganese, and lithium.

    A large amount of cobalt comes from artisanal mining in the Congo. Artisanal is just a fancy term that means it’s not work being performed by a company at a dedicated mine, but on a small scale such as a single person digging an area and collecting it or a handful of people who run their own mine. Unfortunately, though, we know that slave and child labor are used at a large portion of these mines.

    Fortunately, there has been a large push to move to more sustainable mining practices. Some Congo miners have allowed outside observers to verify that all miners are adults working of their own volition.

    Other countries such as Cuba and Indonesia have begun mining cobalt and are also following minimum employment practices. As a side benefit, these mines are also the main sources for nickel which reduces the number of mines we need.

    Manganese is rather interesting. The current extraction process involves using natural gas to separate the components. However, there are nodules on the ocean floor which are rich in manganese. While these would produce less pollution to process, there are worries that removing the nodules would cause irreparable harm to the local environment.

    However, even if your batteries were mined in the most harmful method possible and your power comes from the dirtiest plant of all time, the long term emissions are still much better than driving the most fuel-efficient ICE over the same time period.


  • And while it’s a more minor issue, EVs are heavier than ICE vehicles in the same class, which causes more road wear and more tire wear (and more micro plastics to enter the environment).

    Easy solution is to move to Indiana. Our environment means that almost every day from November through April, the temperatures will be in the 30s-50s in the day and 10-20 at night, so the pavement is constantly cracking. Combine that with the lack of investment in infrastructure (Indy literally has a ban on new streetlights and stop lights going back to the 80s) and it doesn’t matter how heavy the car is, the pavement will be just as broken.










  • OpnSense would be the easiest way if you wanted to go. It’s still not easy, but the articles online should help you out.

    First you’d need a machine. I’ve got an m920q I bought off eBay for $135 after shipping.

    The computer will likely only have one Ethernet port. And it’s likely the port is Realtek which isn’t supported well.

    So, you’ll need to get yourself a NIC (a fancy term for a network card). There are good forum posts and articles online about the best NICs to buy for your needs. Intel is a must. However, you can find many of their NICs online labeled as another brand - usually HP, Lenovo, or Dell. Again, the forum posts will tell you what to look for.

    If you bought the same computer I mentioned above, you’ll also need a riser and a bezel. Amazon and eBay will have a good selection.

    Now assemble it. Flash the computer with OpnSense. Don’t plug it in as your router yet. Follow along with some basic setup guides online to figure out how you want it configured.

    Once you’re happy, plug it in as your router and test that it works. If not, you’ll need to put your old router back in place until you can figure out what you need to change.


  • SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do.

    That’s how nearly all modern devices work. Li-Ion can’t be charged and discharged simultaneously. There is circuitry to split the power between the battery and the device when it’s being charged.

    Cheaper devices will just stop charging when you use them or they won’t work at all when plugged in.




  • Only way I’m using most shopping sites is if I know they’re trustworthy and if they support PayPal or one of the major payment processors. I’m not going to type my CC number into a random website and trust that they aren’t hacked.

    There are a lot of issues with PayPal, but at least it makes it easy for me to get a refund if the seller refuses. The last time I had to get a refund, it was because the seller told me I had to ship my $20 product back to China in order to get a 50% refund. This was despite the returns agreement explicitly requiring them to cover return shipping and that shipping it to China would have cost me about $150.



  • Blame the Republicans in Congress.

    It took until last May for the Senate to finally confirm the fifth Commissioner. Per law, they can’t create new rules or regulations when there’s a vacancy.

    Have you noticed that 5G was getting faster and had more coverage until it more or less stopped last year? For the first time in history, Congress did not renew the FCC’s spectrum auction authority. T-Mobile bought a lot of 2.5Ghz spectrum back in 2022 but the FCC couldn’t grant it to them. It wasn’t until a month and a half ago that they could use it… Because Congress passed a bill that granted the authority for auctions held prior to March 2023.

    They’ve also tried going after the VOIP services that don’t follow STIR/SHAKEN or allow robocallers. But they don’t have enough funding to do much more than the minimum. For the very few that they can catch, they first provide a warning period for the company to remove robocallers and correct their systems. If that fails, the FCC then permits carriers to block the provider, but they can’t mandate it.

    Except even that’s not enough. The FCC can’t take actual legal action against the providers, only the robocallers. So quite often, the provider will just change their business name, list different fake people as their executives, and then rejoin the networks as if nothing ever happened. Look up One Owl Telecom - they’ve done this numerous times.