Prices of the electricity we use to charge

[Ghost1951]

OK, so it's difficult to get actual data on the subject. Suppose I said that migrants in the UK are eating cats and dogs. Would you say that's false, bearing in mind that many of them come from countries where these animals are routinely eaten?

There are all kinds of deviants doing unspeakable things.

You and I have both seen individual cases of people from China doing stuff like this. They are deviants.

It would be a distortion to suggest that chinese take aways are doing this., just like it would be a distortion to suggest that men of your age and mine are involved in taking horrible photographs of children, though some undoubtedly are doing.

I'm quite friendly with the guy that runs the chinese takeaway around teh corner from where I am sitting right now in Newcastle. I have been buying food from him for about forty years. He is teh same age as me and goes to hong Kong every year to see his grandchildren that live there. He works hard and makes a decent living. One of his sons is now mainly the one I see there if I go. He would be insane to catch a cat and put it in someone's dinner, or risk getting caught eating a cat himself - even if he had done that long ago in China. His reputation is high. Why would he do that?

 

[Ghost1951]

All this diversion into Chinese takeaways in England is a pointless exercise. The issue is that Trump lost that debate in the opinion of anyone who has an open mind. He was all over the place. I watched the whole debate - about an hour and a half long.

Harris avoided answering a couple of questions. My impression of her (and you know that earlier I thought she would lose the election) was that she was far sharper than him, told the truth and will have impressed many voters.

She will want another debate. Trump will not.

He's a dead duck - - - - unless there are a lot more deranged voters about than I think. If worrying numbers of Americans are really cult believers, then all bets are off.

 

[nigelbb]

I just watched the Trump/Harris debate in its entirety.

I think I am going to have to do an about turn on the prediction I made some weeks ago.

Trump was rambling and nasty. Very unappealing to any undecided voter. I now think he will lose. She beat him completely. Everyone will see who the rational adult was in that debate. At one point, Trump said that immigrants were eating people's cats and dogs. When the moderator challenged this, Trump doubled down on it. This was a gift to Harris. It was laughable.

It was not only laughable but she laughed at him when he came out with this rambling racist nonsense, which angered him even more.

BTW Has anyone ever seen Trump laugh? He seems to alternate between smirking & scowling but unlike Harris doesn't reveal normal emotions.

 

[nigelbb]

Really! I thought you were the sort of guy that could figure stuff out. Does he look like or behave like a cat lover? What do you think he was going to do with it, bearing in mind that he works for a Chinese restaurant, and many Chinese restaurants have been prosecuted for such things as having cat and dog pelts in their bins.

Do you have a link for this startling claim?

 

[nigelbb]

When the foreign countries around USA heard that the borders are open, the first thing they did is kick out all their criminals, psychos, pedos and other undesirables. The immigrants eating pets has been extensively reported in social media, especially in Ohio. It's only a meme to remind people that the borders are open and undesirable people are coming in unchecked. That's the point. All the discussion about pets is just a diversion to get people arguing about it, when the real problem is the open border.

So it's a lie designed to inflame anti-immigrant feelings?

 

[saneagle]

Do you have a link for this startling claim?

There are many stories like this:

Bin bags of cats heads found near to curry mile in Manchester - Google Search

What's your theory then for what the Chinese guy intended to do with the cat after he'd trapped it in the bag? Ah yes, he wanted it as a friend for his other cat.

 

[nigelbb]

There are many stories like this:

Bin bags of cats heads found near to curry mile in Manchester - Google Search

What's your theory then for what the Chinese guy intended to do with the cat after he'd trapped it in the bag? Ah yes, he wanted it as a friend for his other cat.

That's a report from over ten years ago of several served cats heads found in a bag. It doesn't support your assertion that "many Chinese restaurants have been prosecuted for such things as having cat and dog pelts in their bins".

As you cannot produce any evidence for your startling claim my only conclusion is that it's either a lie you made up yourself or you are merely repeating a lie without checking its veracity.

 

[Ghost1951]

There are many stories like this:

Bin bags of cats heads found near to curry mile in Manchester - Google Search

What's your theory then for what the Chinese guy intended to do with the cat after he'd trapped it in the bag? Ah yes, he wanted it as a friend for his other cat.

Here's the thing that gets me about all this - chicken is cheap. I bought a whole medium chicken in Lidle last week for about £3.85. - and that's a retail price. Takeaways buy at wholesale prices. The profit margin on takeaway food is massive. The meat content of a Chinese Takeaway is about £0.75 at the most - probably less. The rest of the food content is a handful of vegetables, rice and spices - maybe another £1.25 - so at most, the content of the meal is costing £2.

The price of the meal to the customer is probably in the region of £8. There is no financial incentive to put cat into any takeaway meal. The time and effort to catch a cat; to skin a cat; to remove the entrails and bones of a cat is VERY significant.

Anyone eating a cat would have to REALLY want to eat cat. It makes no sense at all to go to all that trouble - ( the greatest of which would be in catching a cat)in order to feed it fraudulently to customers of a Chinese takeaway presented as chicken. If people are catching cats for food, they are certainly dealing with a rare and expensive kind of food.

It could be that some psycho individual is killing cats because he is a lunatic.

Of course the other possibility is that these are insane rumours made up by nutters on social media.

The idea that anyone would use so called 'social media' as a source of news information makes me laugh. There are people on social media advocating UTTERLY ridiculous ideas about QAnon, the Challenger disaster being a fake, NASA didn't land on the moon, and how they were assaulted by penetration by aliens with long fingers..... I could go on.

Anyone using unverified social media stories as news, needs to have along hard think about what they are doing.

 

[Ghost1951]

When Saneagle (who is a very clever and sensible fellow) goes on about things like this, I think he is playing a game and winding us up. There is no way the fellow who analyses technical e-bike problems and shares his knowledge really believes these things. I'm just not having it. He's a joker... And we have fallen for his trick.

OK - you got me -

 

[Woosh]

When Saneagle (who is a very clever and sensible fellow) goes on about things like this, I think he is playing a game and winding us up. There is no way the fellow who analyses technical e-bike problems and shares his knowledge really believes these things. I'm just not having it. He's a joker... And we have fallen for his trick.

OK - you got me -

the same person can do both, being clever and believing stories in social media.
I agree that he's winding us up though.

 

[Ghost1951]

Interesting idea for long term, large scale energy storage.

"If you want to make a battery that's dirt cheap, you have to make it out of dirt."

Pretty clever stuff. Store surplus renewable energy as heat and use that heat to heat cities.

Hot sand at 600c in large storage vessels underground can absorb surplus wind and solar energy and store it almost indefinitely for use in district heating schemes. All you need is a big hole, some insulation around the edges, fit pipework inside the hole containing resistive electric heaters, and fill the hole with dry sand.

Heat up the sand with surplus electrical energy from wind farms and solar parks when it is there and you can keep it for a long time for use when heat is needed.

I found this on the Guache battery website https://docs.gouach.com/
Lots of interesting stuff on that site.

What is a sand battery? — Polar Night Energy

A “sand battery” is a high temperature thermal energy storage that uses sand or sand-like materials as its storage medium. It stores energy in sand as heat.

polarnightenergy.fi

 

[Ghost1951]

Climate change: 'Sand battery' could solve green energy's big problem

A storage device made from sand may overcome the biggest issue in the transition to renewable energy.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[flecc]

Here's the thing that gets me about all this - chicken is cheap. I bought a whole medium chicken in Lidle last week for about £3.85. - and that's a retail price. Takeaways buy at wholesale prices. The profit margin on takeaway food is massive. The meat content of a Chinese Takeaway is about £0.75 at the most - probably less. The rest of the food content is a handful of vegetables, rice and spices - maybe another £1.25 - so at most, the content of the meal is costing £2.

The price of the meal to the customer is probably in the region of £8. There is no financial incentive to put cat into any takeaway meal. The time and effort to catch a cat; to skin a cat; to remove the entrails and bones of a cat is VERY significant.

Anyone eating a cat would have to REALLY want to eat cat. It makes no sense at all to go to all that trouble - ( the greatest of which would be in catching a cat)in order to feed it fraudulently to customers of a Chinese takeaway presented as chicken. If people are catching cats for food, they are certainly dealing with a rare and expensive kind of food.

It could be that some psycho individual is killing cats because he is a lunatic.

Of course the other possibility is that these are insane rumours made up by nutters on social media.

The idea that anyone would use so called 'social media' as a source of news information makes me laugh. There are people on social media advocating UTTERLY ridiculous ideas about QAnon, the Challenger disaster being a fake, NASA didn't land on the moon, and how they were assaulted by penetration by aliens with long fingers..... I could go on.

Anyone using unverified social media stories as news, needs to have along hard think about what they are doing.

Big cats will eat Chinamen though:

Visitor mauled to death by tiger in Ningbo zoo in China

Police shot the tiger dead at the Ningbo zoo after it attacked the man who entered its enclosure.

www.bbc.co.uk

.

 

[Ghost1951]

Big cats will eat Chinamen though:

Visitor mauled to death by tiger in Ningbo zoo in China

Police shot the tiger dead at the Ningbo zoo after it attacked the man who entered its enclosure.

www.bbc.co.uk

.

They shot the tiger. Pretty harsh really under the circumstances.

The man was rushed to the nearest hospital where he was pronounced dead.
He had climbed over the zoo's walls to avoid paying for a ticket, and landed in the tiger enclosure, local tourism authorities said in a statement.

I think it is an example of natural selection.

Like this one which also resulted in a death. Who would do this at a tiger drive through?

Here Kitty kitty.....

 

[soundwave]

Bodycam shows woman with 'fur on her lips' booked for eating Ohio cat

Police found Allexis Ferrell, 27, with 'fur on her lips' and 'blood on her hands' when they were called by horrified neighbors on August 16.

www.dailymail.co.uk

 

[Ghost1951]

Apologies, I misunderstood your post. Generation by cycling has been tried many times and it's always very unproductive and takes huge effort all out of proportion to the gain. The only practical use outside of some lighting I've ever seen was one where smoothies were being produced for on street sales in another country, I don't remember which, but the video carefully didn't show it actually happening.

I don't have any exact figures, but a fit cyclist up to their middle years can produce about 200 watts of effort for a couple of hours, but not many cycle at that rate of output continuously. That's a theoretical 4.75 amps at 42 volts, but of course there are the inevitable energy conversion losses, so in practical terms maybe 3 to 3.5 amps to charge a battery.

Trouble is then, could or would anyone want pedal at that rate for four or fiveanoth hours to charge their battery, very exhausting. All the generating uses I've actually seen demonstrated have seen riders exhausted very quickly.
.

Another side to this is that the extra food the rider needs to eat, in order to do the work involved in generating power, or even in ordinary human powered cycling has significant carbon emissions bound up in it. Food production, manufacture and distribution is carbon heavy. I have seen a paper which suggested that an American fed cyclist can emit as much as 95 grams of co2 per kilometer cycled. That seems extraordinary to me, since it is about the same co2 emission as my car, but i recall also reading some time ago that a cyclist replacing his consummed energy had a real impact the same as a car doing 75mpg.

Ref. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2022/ph240/schutt2/

 

[Woosh]

Bodycam shows woman with 'fur on her lips' booked for eating Ohio cat

Police found Allexis Ferrell, 27, with 'fur on her lips' and 'blood on her hands' when they were called by horrified neighbors on August 16.

www.dailymail.co.uk

She admitted she killed the cat and didn't know why she did it. She said she did not eat the cat and had no blood on her face.
She's neither Haitian nor migrant and the cat appears to be hers. Just mad I guess.
I was amazed to learn from a postcast of 'the news agents' that as much as 41% of Americans believe conspiracists and 25% believe that a dictator is what the USA needs.

 

[lenny]

It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says

It took 50,000 gallons of water to put out Tesla Semi fire in California, US agency says

The National Transportation Safety Board says California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons of water to put out flames after a crash.

apnews.com

 

[Ghost1951]

She admitted she killed the cat and didn't know why she did it. She said she did not eat the cat and had no blood on her face.
She's neither Haitian nor migrant and the cat appears to be hers. Just mad I guess.
I was amazed to learn from a postcast of 'the news agents' that as much as 41% of Americans believe conspiracists and 25% believe that a dictator is what the

 

[Ghost1951]

She admitted she killed the cat and didn't know why she did it. She said she did not eat the cat and had no blood on her face.
She's neither Haitian nor migrant and the cat appears to be hers. Just mad I guess.
I was amazed to learn from a postcast of 'the news agents' that as much as 41% of Americans believe conspiracists and 25% believe that a dictator is what the USA needs.

I could post that image of the bell curve again, but it is already on this thread. About 25% of any human population are very dim witted. 40% of the population are below median intelligence.

This should help explain some of the issues we are talking about such as Trump's ability to get votes, and how easy is to get people to believe and do very stupid things.