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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I mean… this thing just ate energy. The prototype car was pulling 6.5kV off the conducting rails to keep the air jets running hard enough for the hovering, and it wasn’t even carrying a passenger load. If you add more weight you have to add more air thrust to keep hovering, which means bigger engines and more power, and the production model will need extras for redundancy because if the air cushion weakens while you’re doing 200+kph and the car just grazes the track you’re in big trouble. I seriously doubt this concept can scale up to a working transit system and be at all safe. The electricity input alone would be a hazard.

    I’ll bet it sounded like a Harrier from the outside too.

    Also what do you think the vortex is like above the air intakes? I’m imagining this thing cruising along sucking in birds and just flushing them straight down onto the track as it travels the countryside.





  • Well right, and coating them with plastic means that they leave plastic residue behind if they break down in an uncontrolled environment, and increases the cost and complexity of recycling:

    If the paper has a plastic or aluminum coating, it can be recycled, but it is much more expensive and complicated.

    Some plastic coatings can be separated from paper during the recycling process. Still, it is often cheaper and easier to use virgin materials to create new products than recycling paper coated with plastic.

    Paper coated with plastic isn’t suitable for composting, and most times, such products are incinerated for heat or landfilled rather than recycled.

    https://www.almostzerowaste.com/non-recyclable-paper/

    Yes they already exist. They are not really better than pure plastic, they’re kind of a form of greenwashing because they appear to be environmentally friendly.


  • Aida said the new material is as strong as petroleum-based plastics but breaks down into its original components when exposed to salt.

    If this means that it does not break down when exposed to just water, that’s a pretty big deal. Water solubility has been the major issue making biodegradable plastics useless for food packaging (typically you want to either keep the food wet and water in, or dry and water out - either way water permeability is a problem).

    Of course most foods also contain salt, so… I guess that’s why the article talks about coatings. If the material has to be coated to keep it from breaking down too fast, what is the point? either the coating will prevent it from breaking down, or it just moves the problem to the coating not breaking down.












  • Encrypting the connection is good, it means that no one should be able capture the data and read it - but my concern is more about the holes in the network boundary you have to create to establish the connection.

    My point of view is, that’s not something you want happening automatically, unless you manually configured it to do that yourself and you know exactly how it works, what it connects to and how it authenticates (and preferably have some kind of inbound/outbound traffic monitoring for that connection).