Stupid World

[R650R]

Couple of gems in recent news clips.

Labour MP announcing shakeup to clean car discounts... reporters full of angst about rich getting subsidy and more should be done for secondhand market (which govt is but not enough apparently). Hilarious that being an accomplice to all the climate change propoganda they are now coming to the realisation of how it will work. Only the wealth will have freedom of travel, it’s the bus or pudhbike in rain for peasants lol
Oh how they shreiked when he said Toyota not Tesla was getting lions share of discount money

Also luxon interviewed about maybe banning Vapes. Sour face presenter snarkly said isn’t that just prohibition we know that doesn’t work. Bet she wouldn’t say that about gun laws....

[Berries]

Although, since we are talking about EVs....

"WIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII IIZ!"

Was stood in the middle of a quiet street on Monday taking photos. Turned round and there was an electric car sitting there not ten feet away from me. Had seen it parked up earlier so wonder whether the driver did it for shits and giggles? Never heard a thing. Will be interesting after a few pedestrians have been dropped by these cars to see what happens.

Just like the old milk floats really but without the chink of bottles that provided an early warning that they were coming.

[TheDemonLord]

Was stood in the middle of a quiet street on Monday taking photos. Turned round and there was an electric car sitting there not ten feet away from me. Had seen it parked up earlier so wonder whether the driver did it for shits and giggles? Never heard a thing. Will be interesting after a few pedestrians have been dropped by these cars to see what happens.

Just like the old milk floats really but without the chink of bottles that provided an early warning that they were coming.

Formula E and also there's some interesting videos from FoS on Electric Cars that sounds especially angry when they are running at High RPMs, but yeah, at low RPMs - they are dangerously quiet, reminds me of the warnings you see at Gliding clubs.

[R650R]

Popular tv show that chronicled the effects of alcohol abuse, disrespect of the law and poor decisions is cancelled after complaints by people who abuse alcohol, disrespect of the law and make poor decisions.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/...ion-but-to-end

I guess we’ll never hear the phrase again “thanks to the communities help police have arrested...”

[Kickaha]

My friend/mechanic/EV owner tells me that they run considerably higher tyre pressures to get maximum battery range. He thought they must be using special tyres. Apparently not.:

They generally run a low rolling resistance tyre from factory, Tesla recommended tyre pressure is 42psi, cant remember what the Leafs and such run but I don't remember it as being high

[Grumph]

Formula E and also there's some interesting videos from FoS on Electric Cars that sounds especially angry when they are running at High RPMs, but yeah, at low RPMs - they are dangerously quiet, reminds me of the warnings you see at Gliding clubs.

Saw somewhere that the new class of electric rally cars are going to have to be fitted with an audible approach noise generator.

Spectators wandering deep in a forest stage could well be caught unaware by a fast approaching electric. Potentially messy.

No idea what they will sound like - but how long before someone plays heavy metal at high volume.....

[TheDemonLord]

but how long before someone plays heavy metal at high volume.....

Okay, I'm sold.

Either that or Ride of the Valkyries (Apocalypse Now style).

On a side note - I heard about someone in the second Gulf war that figured out how to mount a PA system to an M1 Abrams tank - the story goes that they were playing 'Bodies' by Drowning Pool...

[pritch]

At a conference in Turkey a Russian delegate tried to steal the Ukrainian flag. A Ukranian delegate was not impressed. Looks like the Russian took a whack on the snout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRalwGp3Au0




Update: I was wondering what conference would have both Russian and Ukranian attendees. It was a meeting of member countries of the Black Sea economic zone.

[Berries]

Either that or Ride of the Valkyries (Apocalypse Now style).

This would work -

[R650R]

Methdealers and organised crime won’t need to go to casino to launder money anymore...

Reverse ATM the ultimate expression of human stupidity....

[pritch]

George Santos has been charged in federal court. George was elected to Congress from a New York district. The press, including ours, reported that he had embellished his CV. That was incorrect use of language, his whole life history was a work of fiction. Virtually nothing was real. In matters of fund raising and expenditure though facts do matter.

Justice in the US moves slow, sometimes though it does actually move.

[R650R]

Some serious riding by Aussie bike cops, they don’t muck about.

The ending is pure gold

[onearmedbandit]

They don't quite have the style of the Brazilian cops on bikes but a top effort nonetheless.

[R650R]

Fake meat... there’s proving to be some problems....

https://joannenova.com.au/2023/05/fa...han-real-beef/

It turns out that replicating a cow in a laboratory is not as simple as expected. A new study points at some very major and potentially very hard to solve problems with laboratory meat. We can scale up vats of bacteria in factories easily, but animal cells are very different. Muscle cells not only need a sterile complicated broth but they are basically a sitting-duck feast for any bacteria.

Quote of the day:

“USD 2 billion has already been invested in this technology, but we don’t really know if it will be better for the environment,” Risner said.

Think of a cow as being an entire industrial production campus for meat — to deal with chemical toxins it comes with a customized chemical factory (a liver) and two industrial filter systems (kidneys), and a full immune defense force on a 24 hour watch to deal with the constant flood of microbial contaminants. Cows also have nutrient intake systems to break down grass into separate chemical components which are stored, transported and chemically tweaked to suit. All departments are self repairing, and are equipped with their own laboratory testing, messaging and alert service. The sterile growth conditions of muscle are maintained most of the time in close proximity to dirt and poo. The biological machinery has been road-tested and refined for a half a billion years. Yet somehow we thought we could replicate all that and do it more efficiently in a couple of decades.

Instead of thirty factories, 200 labs, 2000 trucks and sterilized vats of heated pharmaceutical grade goo, we could just use a cow.

In 2013, the first cultured burger patty cost €250,000.

It takes a lot of energy to replicate a cow
It’s not enough to kill bacteria in the growth broth, we have to remove the dead body parts of the bacteria too. The outside shell of many bacteria breaks up into is what we call an endotoxin. You may not know it but these are just bad, bad, bad — they are lipopolysaccarides that sometimes leak from our intestinal walls and trigger fever, nausea, inflammation, shivering and shock. So the dead parts of bacteria have to be cleaned out of the broth — which means chromatography, or ultrafiltration, or ion exchanges, and fine membranes. All of which uses lots of energy.


The broth itself must contain salts, sugars, amino acids, and vitamins, and the production of each of these elements involves an expenditure of energy.

This “pharmaceutical” level of purification is essential as animal cells will not grow in a broth that is “contaminated” with bacteria. Experts involved in improving the process are testing to what extent it is possible to move away from purification.

The paper’s first author, Derrick Risner of the University of California (U.S.), in a commentary for “New Scientist”, expressed doubt that moving away from “pharmaceutical” levels of broth purification would be possible since even trace levels of contamination can destroy animal cell cultures.

From the paper — we used to use serum from baby cow blood to grow cells in culture but that is an 18 step process and energy intensive…

Animal cell culture is inherently different than culturing bacteria or yeast cells due to their enhanced sensitivity to environmental factors, chemical and microbial contamination. This can be illustrated by the industrial shift to single use bioreactors for monoclonal antibody production to reduce costs associated with contamination (Jacquemart et al., 2016). Animal cell growth mediums have historically utilized fetal bovine serum (FBS) which contains a variety of hormones and growth factors (Jochems et al., 2002). Serum is blood with the cells, platelets and clotting factors removed. Processing of FBS to be utilized for animal cell culture is an 18-step process that is resource intensive due to the level of refinement required for animal cell culture. Thus, the authors believe that commercial production of an ACBM product utilizing FBS or any other animal product to be highly unlikely given this high level of refinement.

The authors say they might be underestimating the costs.

The requirement of endotoxin removal would also contribute to the environmental impact of ACBM products which makes our LCIA results for the minimum scenarios to be underestimated minimums. Utilization of commodity grade growth medium components such as glucose for animal cell growth is unlikely unless the components undergo an endotoxin separation process. The effect of endotoxin can vary greatly depending on cell type and source; however 25 ng/ml of endotoxin was shown to cause cell apoptosis when coupled with non-lethal heat shock (Corning, 2020).

Endotoxins kill cells at just 25 nanograms per ml. The purity required in a complicated mixture on a commerical scale needs Olympic level chemistry. It’s like feeding pharmaceutical grade drugs to your cows instead of grass. This isn’t going to scale up well.

[R650R]

OMG teaching yoga is now cultural appropriation

https://i.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/1318...hindu-practice

Is it still cultural appropriation when a minority adopts practices of the coloniser??? Asking for a friend lol

I always used to get s laugh when my local massage chick would do all her namaste routine, burning Incense talking about spiritual energy etc... then nek minnit “Alexa play relaxation music” 😂😂😂😂😂