I assume you're talking about on-street charging? If so... I think you're right. The UK, like Poland (where I live), has a LOT to do in terms of supporting folks that live in a flat. On-street charging really needs to be properly prioritised, properly funded, the paperwork/process streamlined, etc.
In Poland, especially in the cities, parking is always an issue and doubly so around large blocks of flats. I doubt the new coalition government has the backbone to do much about the situation, but while EV adoption is low here, they have the chance to get ahead of the curve and mandate new builds have a meaningful percentage of parking with ~11 kW charging points. Existing builds should be heavily supported but it should also be mandatory to retrofit charging at existing parking spots.
Yes, or some regions in China have pretty good battery swap infrastructure, for example NIOPower.
Whatever the solution, there isn't one in the UK. I think UK has to get over its NIMBYism before any serious infra projects can take place. We even struggled to build a space port in the middle of nowhere, and it was for a national cause in a way.
I actually happen to know about Poland's situation because I lived in Central/Eastern Europe for a while and it's the same thing everywhere. Lithuania's capital Vilnius has solved this by seemingly allowing private companies to convert some parking spaces into EV charging bays. Now there are more bays than there is demand for.
Maybe the government should simply let private companies convert building block parking lots to electric car charging stations in part. Perhaps up to the % of EV users in each block of flats. So if 10% of car owners drive EVs, 10% of all common parking spaces can be converted. Of course, if the situation is similar in Poland to how it is in Lithuania, some of the condominium buildings and the land they are on are owned by the unit owners fractionally. But NIMBYism isn't a problem in Lithuania. Is it a problem in Poland? I think people could be quite supportive of upgrading some parking bays, even if they owned a fraction of the land under them.
If it wasn't for NIMBYism, I am pretty sure the UK could do this too for roadside parking.
The end of Chapter 12 from Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anywhere on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.
History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.
Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.
They flew out of the cloud.
They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.
For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned around.
"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.
On the way back, they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.
I just bought an MBA M1 with 16 GB of RAM. I had to check to make sure that it was actually going into sleep mode because the system seems to instantly turn on and unlock when coming out of sleep mode.
It's also cold most of the time; it takes ages to get up to what feels like "room temperature". I'm besmitten.
I've had something similar happen. I was keeping home-made ginger beer in our refrigerator for some weeks after I'd made several bottles of it. Ginger beer is yeast, water, sugar, ginger juice, and a few other things. I didn't realize that - even at 3-4 degrees Celsius the yeast would continue doing their thing, albeit slowly.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, right next to the fridge, when a 750 ml glass bottle of ginger beer exploded. It took out another bottle along with the tempered glass shelf it had been sitting on.
Not only did it take more than an hour to clean up, the replacement shelf my wife ordered was the wrong one, so she had to order yet another replacement. It took ages to arrive.
I have not yet been allowed to make more home-made ginger beer, which is a shame because it's very tasty and is excellent for making cocktails in the summer.
Seconded for Ubiquiti. I've had a Dream Machine Pro (firewall/router), a couple of their USW-Pro-24/48-PoE switches, and some of their AP's (U6-LR mostly) for a few months now and everything seems to work well.
I went for the Ubiquiti stuff because it seemed like it would be fairly easy to configure and it was... and I don't have a lot of experience with configuring routers/firewalls. Ubiquiti's stuff was also less expensive than some Cisco gear I was looking at, though that may be more because of my location (Poland) than anything else. Also, because I'm in Poland, houses are constructed largely out of brick, concrete, and rebar. So, reasonably powerful AP's were needed and the U6-LR's seem to fit the bill.
My only issue with the Ubiquiti stuff is that everyone admonishes everyone else to not automatically upgrade due to some pretty serious issues from firmware upgrades from Ubiquiti in the past. However, because someone will always have issues with an upgrade, it can be hard to know for sure if the latest firmware is going cause real issues or not.
iCloud photo sharing? Works with people that do and do not have iPhones/Macs. At least I know that non-Apple users can see photos in a shared album; I don't know if they can add photos to a shared photo album as well - I've never tried that.
Several years ago I got tired for Facebook and quit it. My parents, in-laws, and siblings have an Apple shared photo album for "general" content and we occasionally set up albums for the same group of folks when there's a big event/trip/etc.
We occasionally Facetime or use chat via Messages. Email's are in the mix as well.
My wife and I are building a home at the moment and, when it came time to consider appliances, noise of a given appliance was a factor and something we took into consideration. For example, we chose a very quiet vent hood to go over the hob/stovetop since it's an open plan kitchen/living area. Vent hoods can be very noisy (65+ dB) when running maximum.
However, given that there are tractors in fields nearby, dogs, chickens, and other "sounds of rural life" ... we made sure to put in a LOT of insulation and also went for triple-paned windows. While the house isn't yet complete, we hear almost no outside sounds when we are inside.
When we compare that to our current location - on a side street, but a moderately busy one - with sometimes couriers on loud motorcycles, lorries, police/fire vehicles (sirens), and the occasional person with a car that has an exhaust tuned to be loud ...the difference is really quite remarkable.
Maybe that the quotas are very low, or that there are quotas at all. Mainland Norway definitely doesn't have quotas like this; rather alcohol is simply made to be quite expensive.
When I read this my first thought was something like, "I bet that those who don't drink are making a bit of profit on the side by selling their allowances." However, I'm guessing that for Svalbard's dedicated drinkers ...they're finding a way around the import restrictions.
It would be interesting to hear how folks deal with the restrictions by someone that lives on Svalbard or has spent significant time there.
> Mainland Norway definitely doesn't have quotas like this; rather alcohol is simply made to be quite expensive.
If you don't mind the higher price I'm sure you can still import it as long as you pay the duty. (The linked page merely says that you cannot import tax-free.) So ultimately it's the same situation as in (the rest of) Norway, but with some small allowance of cheaper tax-free alcohol. If they didn't have the quotas, people would arbitrage it.
Well, officially no. I remember outside Trondheim were they would only sell half cups of coffee (the implication being you would fill the rest with your home distilled liquor).
24 bottles of liquor, 6 bottles of fortified wines, nearly 300 cans of beer, and unlimited wine annually is low? I'd hate to be the liver of anybody drinking that much.
Annually? Everything sounds high when you say it annually!
Looking at the numbers on a smaller scale, if you don't count the unlimited wine, the monthly quota works out to be about 2.2 drinks / night - about 1.5 shouts of liquor and less than 1 light beer a night.
Thats a pretty resonable amount of alcohol to consume - just slightly higher than the 14 drinks / week maximum that many health authorities recommend.
How would you feel if the government regulated how much sugar or salt you can eat, how many hours of video games you can play, or maybe even forced you to exercise 400 hours (per year)?
> How would you feel if the government regulated how much sugar or salt you can eat, how many hours of video games you can play, or maybe even forced you to exercise (400 hours / year)?
That's actually an interesting idea... Not saying I'd recommend it, but I'd be interested in how this affects a population at a large scale.
Requiring physical activity might lead to population demand for parks, more social interaction, less isolationism, less conflict. And I've had times where a hard limit on video games would've been nice. Incentivizing a society to not fall to their vices doesn't sound too bad.
Two per day is not quite what the US government recommends:
Adults of legal drinking age can choose not to drink or to drink in moderation by limiting intake to 2 drinks or less in a day for men and 1 drink or less in a day for women, when alcohol is consumed. Drinking less is better for health than drinking more.
2/day is a recommended upper bound, applied on days where alcohol is consumed. Not the same as "you can drink 2/day year -round without consequence."
> How would you feel if the government regulated how much sugar or salt you can eat,
One reason this would be bad is there is actually very little evidence that salt is bad for you. It's entirely possible most people don't get enough salt.
I believe for the Bathurst weekend (V8 Car race) in Australia, people are limited to a carton of beer or a bottle of liquor a DAY per person.... Not sure if that says more about the Svalbard limits or my countrymen.
That's about 49300 miles a year, or about 200 miles a day if you drive five days a week, 50 weeks out of the year. That's a lot of driving. What has pushed you to be driving so much?
Labour ought to be doing all of this already, but I haven't seen it yet and this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrddz2407zo ... is a good example of the situation.
In Poland, especially in the cities, parking is always an issue and doubly so around large blocks of flats. I doubt the new coalition government has the backbone to do much about the situation, but while EV adoption is low here, they have the chance to get ahead of the curve and mandate new builds have a meaningful percentage of parking with ~11 kW charging points. Existing builds should be heavily supported but it should also be mandatory to retrofit charging at existing parking spots.