Anti-hail netting is definitely a thing (protecting cars or fruit trees), for the reasons you state. Even big hailstones are rather slower than fast golf balls.
Hail damage at car dealerships in my area is so expensive that the dealers have added coverings for the lots (pretty sure highly encouraged by the insurance companies), and they are most definitely not nets. Nets would have been cheaper, so that should say something about their effectiveness (or not)
Hail protection nets are a COTS product. Full stop. Properly-designed nets are exceptionally strong; that's why we make "bulletproof" vests out of them (that's all they are, just a fiber net with a very tight weave).
Just because your local car dealership(s) didn't opt for hail protection nets isn't on its own evidence for or against their effectiveness. There are a great many factors that go into such a decision and, unless you were privy to the decisionmaking process itself, whether or not nets were considered -- much less their effectiveness -- is pure speculation on your part.
Since we're on safety ratings; the Duster gets a 3/5 from Euro NCAP.
Many of Dacia's newer models get 1/5, some 2/5, and only the Sandero gets 4/5, their highest score (in this market).
In the UK, a Duster starts at £20k for the base model , while something equivalent with a 5 star rating like a Nissan Qashqai or Kia Sportage starts at £30k.
Only Lada Largus which is based on Dacia Logan MCV. There was also Lada Xray based on Dacia Sandero, but it's not produced anymore.
Lada Niva is essentially ancient car from 1977 which changed very little since then. It's awesome cheap car with extreme offroad capabilities, -1 star safety and poor reliability. Interesting and unique combination of properties in modern world.
There's also Lada Niva Travel which was developed in 1998 with a bit different market orientation.
Lada Vesta is most modern Lada development and it's not directly based on Renault tech. Lada Granta is a bit older Lada which is in-house development as well. Those are not 4x4, though.
I have no idea whether those cars are sold in Europe. Probably not.
Nivas (both classic/4x4/Legend niva and travel/chevrolet niva) are not based on Renault tech, they've been developed inhouse (with GM help on Travel one)
Yes, but if you look at the euroncap the low score is not for essential safety stuff, it's more because it doesn't have lane assist and other highly optional whistles and bells (in my opinion).
I mean it's not terrible if the price is a concern, even something I'd consider "simple", like a Ford Focus is £30k these days. 70% for the driver is pretty bad though, you'd want much higher safety for the seat that's going to be occupied for 100% of the car's use, and if like myself you have young children you'll want that 5* rating for their safety (even if that includes bells and whistles like lane-exit alerts etc; they can matter when they need to).
For the sake of £10k I'd take a 5* safety rated car, likely with a better finish and quality overall, over a 3*, and as much as I'd like to be understanding about budgets, there's plenty of reliable, high-quality, safe cars on the used market for much less than their new-price.
Is there any _good_ reason to buy a mediocre car new for £20k, over a £40k+ car with a few years on it for £20k? I'm asking genuinely because I don't know, I'd buy the used car every time.
By the way Recoll also has a utility named rclgrep which is an index-less search. It does everything that Recoll can do which can reasonably done without an index (e.g.: no proximity search, no stem expansion etc.). It will search all file types supported by Recoll, including embedded documents (email attachments, archive members, etc.). It is not built or distributed by default, because I think that building an index is a better approach, but it's in the source tar distribution and can be built with -Drclgrep=true. Disclosure: I am the Recoll developper.
Wow this is a gem of a comment. I use Recoll heavily, it's a real super power for an academic, but I had no idea about rclgrep. Thank you for all your work.
What rclgrep does is run the recoll text extraction and do a grep-like operation on the extracted texts. If you want to give it a try, don't hesitate to contact me if you have any trouble building or using it, or think it could be improved. It's more or less a (working) prototype at the moment, but I'm willing to expand it if it looks useful. The "Usage" string is much better in the latest git source than in the tar, and it sorely needs a man page.
This is true but it was certainly not considered good practise even at the time. I've been on the seller part of a few software companies acquisitions from the early nineties, and checking what kind of source control we were using and how was part of every audit. A long history of sccs -> cvs -> subversion ->mercurial or git...
> You still get solar power on cloudy days, it just takes more panels to generate some specific level of power.
That is wrong. On cloudy winter days the inverters often just stop. Source: have 20kW of panels on a house in the south of France.
That’s a technical problem on your end. I still get electricity on cloudy days when the panels are covered in inches of snow.
Now my personal power output does tank during this period, but such extremes are local events. Further hydro, nuclear, and geothermal just don’t care about clouds.
Theres something wrong with your setup. I get about 10-15w of production in the dead of night with a full moon. Source: 5.5kW of panels on a house in South Africa.
Fun anecdote, in the mid-1980s, I was bored at work and wrote a similar simulation in Pascal running on a Vax (11-780 if I remember well), and displaying on a tektro (emulation probably). I discovered after a bit that every time I played with it, all other users wondered why the Vax was suddenly frozen (not sure exactly why, probably the serial I/O) ... Oops.
We are killing species at 100-1,000 times the background rate. The damage can never be undone. The Earth may recover, on geological time scales, but 99.9% of those species aren't ever coming back. It's extremely unwise to be committing mass murder on the biosphere like this, and not a matter of "frugality".
Personally, I think it's very important, and I think most people would agree, to prevent harm and cost to humans, and to enable them to be free, live long, and prosper. [0] I don't think there's a higher moral or practical imperative - if you don't care about that, what do you care about? The GGP said "life on Earth will be around long after our species and its descendants cease to exist", implying that the extinction of humans was not an issue!
Damage to nature, as a general concept, can often shorten lives, cause great harm to the living (warfare, starvation), and cost enormous amounts of money - climate change is very expensive. One reason is that we have enormous amounts of fixed capital - 10,000 years worth, in a way - invested in the ecosystems as they currently are, including all our agriculture, ports, cities, infrastructure, borders, food and water supply, etc. etc. It will be very expensive and pointless to rebuild it all for new ecosystems instead of just retaining what we have.
Also, most people agree that harming animals is also wrong, though not nearly on the level of harming humans. If you physically abuse your dog, for example, people will be angry and there are laws against it in most places.
And I think most people value what is 'natural' to some degree; it seems like a common value of humanity across time and cultures. They prefer the natural hill to the strip-mined one, the green field to the parking lot. They also like coal and parking their car, so there are competing values too.
Personally, I think it's very important, and I think most people would agree, to prevent harm and cost to humans, and to enable them to be free, live long, and prosper. [0] I don't think there's a higher moral or practical imperative - if you don't care about that, what do you care about?
Believe it or not, I have met many people which have a belief system close to "humans are scum and deserve to go extinct" along with "but we're hurting rabbits, and they're cute!".
These people prattle on extensively about how our activities are "hurting the planet", without caring that we're actually hurting ourselves. We aren't part of the equation. Mostly, these sorts just repeat things they've heard without ponderance or thought.
I've had conversations with people about how mosquitoes are important, not to be a food source for things, but instead, because "poor mosquitoes". It doesn't matter to them that mosquitoes are the number on killer of humans, AND the same can be said for the harm caused to animals.
I often wonder if this sort is just a troll. Trolls existed way before the internet ever existed, they can be found at town meetings.
Ah well.
Re: mosquitoes. I absolutely think we should genetically engineer methods which result in the extinction of all blood sucking animals. Leeches, mosquitoes, all flies, bed bugs, you name it. The pain and misery that humans and animals alike suffer from such horrors, is immense.
Animals have been seen to run off of cliffs, due to biting flies swarming them.
They spread disease, they cause infection, and frankly if 10% of birds of extinct as a result, well I will be sad but call it a fair price.
We need to start geo-engineering our own biosphere. This seems like a very good start.
(NOTE: before replying, people should consider. Do they live in a nice city, with almost none of the above parasites? Or do you have great experience of going outside in the spring, in a rural area, with quite literally mosquitoes so thick that you have a hard time seeing through them?
Have you lived in an area where you're being attacked by 100s of insects simultaneously? That's not an exaggeration, even remotely, I can walk outside my door in May and have literally more than 100 insects trying to suck my blood in under a minute.
If these things aren't true, if you don't know what life is actually living in nature, and not just inside a city, then I submit that your opinion has far less value.)
Yes indeed, if you work on a thing, any thing, mistakes can be made.
That does not mean you stop working towards a goal, or you drop the concept of modifying the universe around you. If that were so, we'd still be in the stone age.
Instead you observe those mistakes, consider the lesson of those mistakes, and then apply them towards further efforts. Anything else means we may as well give up all science, and cower in caves.
One of those lessons learned is we now look askance at people who say things like:
> I absolutely think we should genetically engineer methods which result in the extinction of all blood sucking animals. Leeches, mosquitoes, all flies, bed bugs, you name it.
If by this you mean "We should be afraid to do things, because once someone made a mistake", then I guess yes.
As per my prior comment, the sort of logic you are employing is "A bad thing happened once, so we MUST stop all efforts along this tact". Such thought processes are akin to "Let's curl up into a ball and cower". If we took this tact, literally every scientific improvement we've ever had would be out the window, because literally everything we've done has killed people.
Instead what we "know better now", is that we know that we absolutely must look at the entire food chain. We know that we must examine potential ramification with greatest care. We know "better now", to take great care, and move with great deliberation.
The answer is not to go back to the caves. Or to halt progress. The answer is to do better.
To speak to the posted wikipedia article?
In as with many things, it is incorrect.
Here is what it says:
The resulting agricultural failures, compounded by misguided policies of the Great Leap Forward, triggered a severe famine from 1958 to 1962.
Here is what the discovery article says:
The mass deaths of sparrows and nationwide loss of crops resulted in untold millions starving and 20 to 30 million people dying from 1958 to 1962. A 1984 article on the mass famine put it simply: “China suffered a demographic crisis of enormous proportions”
Here is what the paper summary says:
The largest famine in human history occurred in China in modern times and passed almost unrecognized by the outside world. Demographic evidence indicates that famine during 1958-61 caused almost 30 million premature deaths in China and reduced fertility very significantly. Data on food availability suggest that, in contrast to many other famines, a root cause of this one was a dramatic decline in grain output that continued for several years, involving in 1960-61 a drop in output of more than 25 percent. Causes of this drop are found in both natural disaster and government policy. The government's responses are reviewed and implications of this experience for Chinese and world development are considered.
Note how the Wikipedia states 20 to 30 million died directly from starvation. The discovery article states that "untold millions" died from starvation, and as well, "20 to 30 million dying", which of course can be "related". EG, mass migration, unrest, civil disobedience, and more.
Note how the paper itself says, that it was caused by "natural disaster and governmental policy", with "natural disaster" listed first.
I cannot access the paper, but I presume there was not just locust, and not just governmental policy, but a myriad of things happening at the same time, of which governmental policy was one of them. Otherwise, governmental policy would be the primary discussion, not one of the events.
In short, I dispute the numbers presented. I suspect this is a tale that has grown more and more dire, with each retell.
However! I absolutely agree that unplanned efforts, and mistakes, can indeed be disastrous. There are other examples of how dire, messing with an ecosystem can be. Yet that does not mean we stop!. If anything, we'll have to do more work in this regard, as global warming changes things faster than evolution and species migration can happen naturally.
> As per my prior comment, the sort of logic you are employing is "A bad thing happened once, so we MUST stop all efforts along this tact". Such thought processes are akin to "Let's curl up into a ball and cower". If we took this tact, literally every scientific improvement we've ever had would be out the window, because literally everything we've done has killed people.
No; you're fighting a strawman.
Interventions of this nature must be carefully planned, tested, and understood. I support, for example, efforts to eradicate Aedes aegypti because the due dilligence has been done. We have a reasonable understanding of its position in the food chain, smaller-scale test efforts have been done in a variety of places, etc.
"We should eradicate everything that eats blood" is... not the same.
Yeah, ecosystems are fragile, they're equilibria. Of course if you disrupt them you eventually get another one, but I'm quite fond of the ones we have and not looking forward to a cool fungi and jellyfish locust swarm ecosystem or whatever comes next.
I used ed on video terminals connected to VME 68000 Unix V7 machines around 1986. For some reason, I don't remember using vi on them, and in any case, ed remained very useful when the terminal type was misconfigured or unknown to the system, which happened quite a lot (I guess that not everything emulated a VT100 at the time). We actually jumped directly from ed to some Emacs relative (Jove probably), which was the beginning of paradise, and then we received our Sun 3 and it was Emacs all the way to present :)
vi is painful over slow lines, maybe that was it? When I started at SCO in '86 my terminal connected at 9600 baud to a VME 68000 box named "scotty" running Xenix. (All our servers had names containing "sco". Over the years I think we had to settle for just having the letters somewhere in the name.) 9600 baud was luxury after university, where all our terminals connected at 2400 baud.
Oh, it's a different time for any group of people you ask. For some it was AOL, for others the media coverage that picked up around 1995/1996. And some were late to the game and only noticed when every one around them got DSL in the early 2000's. I kind of picked 2004 at random. It represents a (sadly rather sizeable) group of people in rural areas who neither got DSL nor internet over cable before that time and therefore just didn't pay attention.
I have a lot of love for framasoft, but beware that they have limited resources and have in the past closed down or geofenced services I was relying on.
I think Codeberg's co-op style governance/funding makes a lot of sense w.r.t sustainability.
A reminder that Framasoft's a worthy cause to donate to if you are looking for causes to support!
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