Interesting to know that "Dreadnought" is derived (obviously) from the words 'dread' and 'nought' - fear nothing - but "Juggernaut" is a completely different derivation. It relates to a festival in India celebrating Jagganatha (IIRC) where a huge heavy cart is pulled through the streets, and when it gains momentum it is unstoppable. The 'naut' ending is just the English recognising a good opportunity to add a Greek ending to a borrowed word.
Different derivations for a very similar concept - something unstoppable.
Obviously I can rationalise their internal beliefs as to why they do what they do - but it's like explaining the behaviour of an animal. "He's been brought up this way, so he just keeps doing what he's been taught".
OK, except these are also clever people who expect other people to change for them. Why does it never occur that the same might apply to them - that they might have to change and accommodate other people? That's what I can't understand.
Sadly I think a lot of men think of things purely in terms of power. They're constantly worried that they're not top dog, so they have to prove they are all the time by doing stupid aggressive things.
Dude. Let's just put it in simple terms. You're not top dog. You're not even a very high dog. There'll always be people who own more, who have more power, who look more successful. That's not important. It's completely useless to compare yourself to anyone else. All you have to do is to be good enough. You have to be good, and you have to be enough, for those around you.
And what you're going to have to learn, my dude, is that everything is about bargaining. You're always going to have to give up something in order to get something. If you love someone, you have to demonstrate that love by giving them some level of control - over your life together.
I went through some of my early life - up to about my early thirties - convinced I was always missing out. I kept thinking that I had done it tough, I'd struggled, I never got what I wanted. I kept on saying to myself, "on this one point I'm not going to give in, because I've given in on everything else." And I'd still lose.
Then I realised I'd been telling myself a bit of a lie. I'd actually had a pretty good life; we hadn't had a lot but we did have some pretty good advantages that set me up for a good career and a sensible life. And I realised that actually everyone else also saw themselves as hard done by, and if we all fought tooth and nail for the things we considered important then we'd just lose our teeth and nails.
Men are so much nicer when they're kind, when they don't have to show off. We can be courageous and selfless and brave and heroic, we can have chiselled jaws and strong chests - and this doesn't have to come at any cost to anyone else.
I love in "The Incredibles" where Mr Incredible admits that he isn't strong enough to watch his family be endangered. This is a guy who lifts train engines and he's not strong enough. And then Elastigirl says "you don't have to be", because they're all in this together, and they know they can do it. In that moment Mr Incredible is strong.
This won't get read much, I know. But I hope it helps some guys out there feel better about being good, and kind, and gentle, and caring.
Today I learned that the Toyota BZ4X can only be DC fast charged twice per day. It's hard coded to prevent further DC fast charging. Sucks if you expected to just drive it like a car on a long road trip, and didn't plan for this weirdness.
To be honest I don't think this is as much of a WTF as the friend who related this news thinks it is. (I don't have a BZ4X so I couldn't give two figs about it). I could still easily structure a 900km drive in one day around leaving home on a full charge, DC fast charge in the morning, AC charge over lunch, DC fast charge in the afternoon, and that probably gets you ~1000KM.
I think it's Toyota trying to protect their batteries - which is interesting because it's something no other car manufacturer feels the need to do. Toyota paternalism or did they just buy a batch of dodgy batteries and fit them to the car anyway?
@decryption Let's face it though that's never going to happen.
Several friends have gone to Japan and reported there are almost no electric cars there. Even Leafs are a rarity.
Why, when Japan has to import almost all of its petrol and diesel but it generates its own electricity, is it still so wedded to petroleum fuels?
There are lots of hot takes on that question out there, I've shared my own in other posts.
But realistically I don't see any of the Japanese car companies making any full transition to EVs, or making any EVs that are not basically "compliance" cars that are necessary for them to keep selling what they already make.
@PaulWay I’m a bit more optimistic - they’ll make some good EVs eventually, but looks like what happened to them with Korea and China on electronics is gonna happen with cars too, a shadow of their former selves.
I also recently had a "butter chicken" pie, and the name was entirely accurate. It contained butter sauce, and chicken, and pie. Not even a hint of spice. This is a pie that would have even there faintest of the British Raj wondering where the spice was. It would have disappointed even my mother, who is famous in our family for not tolerating spice. But it was delicious and filling and at least vaguely healthy.
Why is it so difficult to find out how much long service leave you have? And why does it require a special form to apply for it rather than the standard leave application web app most companies use these days?
I hope some day when these "loud pipes" bikers have had their hearing destroyed by their stupid exhausts, all the things they used to enjoy in the world are tainted and diminished because of their hearing loss.
No putting on nostalgic classic albums. No hearing their children say they love them, or hearing their grandchildren's first words. Every conversation should be a curse of half-heard mumbles and shouted "what was that"s.
All because they decided to annoy their neighbours she the suburbs they pass through with obnoxious flatulent motorbike noises.
@PaulWay i have a neighbour who likes to take his very not road legal dirt bike out for a spin most evenings. it seems, after five calls to the cops, that this has now stopped, at least for the time being
@PaulWay disagree, not many core banking systems written in PHP, it’s got more of a BASIC vibe including a bunch of “oops this pet project grew to be wildly popular”
@jpm Wordpress is still running on MariaDB and PHP. Joomla and Drupal are as well, AFAICS. Major web-facing systems, running on a language with a long and bitter history of stupid, unnecessary vulnerabilities and complexity.
Yes, I'm biased. Yes, I'm sure it now has lots of lovely features now. But the vast swathe of PHP uses legacy 'features', and I'm willing to bet $100 that most of them have had at some point an attempt to remove them and received a furious backlash from the community complaining about having to revise "millions of lines of code" that apparently depends on insecure, buggy, inconsistent and hard to use legacy functions.
I had to support a system that was written in PHP from 2011 to 2012, and it was awful. In one case I wrote a module specifically to try and bring a bit of order to it:
Trying to write that module in a clean, consistent way was itself hard because of the inconsistent language I had to use.
The real problem was that the people writing the code I had to support wrote bad PHP. They did not have the discipline, because they did not need the discipline. And that's why, in one case, a misfeature that has been around since the product was written was allowed to continue because the programmers said it was impossible to remove it. When I demonstrated that I had removed it, they said that it wouldn't work. When I demonstrated it working, they said it would take too much time to change all the documentation and the customers had now already learned the bad thing and so it would be too difficult to learn the good thing.
Yes, I'm prejudiced, but this is also why languages such as Python and Go and Rust exist. Because sometimes the way to write better code is to use better tools.
Woodworkers will tell you, you can't make a good table with bad tools. It might sound like it's possible, and you might get close, but it won't be a good table. It will have flaws that the bad tools have left behind which cannot be remedied by other bad tools. It'll be a table, but it won't be a good table.
I agree in principle with everything you've said, though I would emphasise that the most significant thing we need to do is behavioural change, and that simply spending money doesn't cut it.
Electrification is a necessary but insufficient step -- we must combine electrification with a significant cut in consumption -- both of time-of-use-energy, and manufactured/embodied energy.
To manufacture a new petrol car releases about 10 tCO2, and to manufacture a new electric car releases about 15-20 tCO2. Some simple maths shows the problem if Australia replaces its car fleet (20 million cars).
Simply, we can't make 20 million cars (of any type) and remain within our carbon budget (though currently, due to accounting trickery, we pretend that emissions that occur in China are a Chinese problem, even though they are manufacturing the goods that we buy)
Because of this, we must, as a matter of priority, move away from the private car as a model of transport. This is the reason that my family's predominant transport is bicycle and public transport. This is doable for most Australians, but it takes some effort.
I've now taken to answering phone calls from unknown numbers with "Ni Hao ma?". It fools the Chinese 'telstra' scammers language detection so instead of hanging up, they proceed with the call. Then select 2 for Chinese and, when they answer, say "Ni Hao ma?" and "Lao shuh?" Until they hang up.
Listening to a Big Ideas podcast about housing in the northern territory. It just makes you wish every politician from every state, territory and federal government would live in one of these houses for a week.
They're taking to the only Aboriginal person that has solar panels on their roof. The power meters there are pre-paid - if you used up your money the power shuts off. The power meter has a plug on the side that says "solar input".
The power and water department said "we can't attach solar, it's dangerous".
They went back to the manufacturer of the power meter that power and water had installed and got the manual and showed that it was perfectly safe.
Power and water put a padlock on his power box so he couldn't plug the panels in.
He took the padlock off with an angle grinder.
This is the kind of stupid, deliberately antagonistic, needlessly wasteful BS that Aboriginal people have to go through to do something that politicians throughout Australia have got without a second thought.
Of course it's a Liberal government there. But things haven't been better under Labor either.
Us city people need to know these things to realise the real gaps in our society.
What's on my mind? SUV drivers that think that they're somehow also sports car drivers, and there's a team of racing spotters out there looking for the P-plater that can get through traffic the quickest.
As a motorcycle rider, they always worry me because they tailgate, they tend to change lanes quickly and without warning, and they don't look out for motorbikes.
As with all traffic, I'm either well behind them, or right beside them, or well ahead of them. I do not sit beside them long, and I never want to be in their blind spot or close enough that if they suddenly have to brake or they decide to gun it I become a casualty under their wheels.