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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • I am quite sure they also don’t offer USB ports to charge the phone you run in lieu of a build in system

    I definitely read an article somewhere where it says that they provide USB power for the tablet/phone.

    kagis

    This article has it:

    https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a64580484/slate-truck-ev-pickup-truck-suv/

    The Truck will come with a phone mount and convenient USB power to mount your phone or a tablet to the dash.

    EDIT: I think that a better criticism is that this thing is just a prototype, still almost two years away from mass production, assuming everything goes right for them. Like, they could have any number of things go wrong (the Trump tariff situation, for one…hard to have any idea where things will be). It could be that they crash into problems trying to get mass production going. It could be that they can’t hit their target price point.




  • From my other link, I don’t think that the touch screen is an optional purchase. I don’t think that they’re selling any entertainment computer to have a screen on. It says that they come standard with a smartphone mounting point or optionally with a tablet mounting point. But the car computer is bring-your-own, and not built into the car. Which…is what I’ve wanted, because computers age out a lot more quickly than cars do.

    I assume that there’ll be an OBD-II slot that one can hook up to to feed data about the car to the phone/tablet. There’s software that can make use of that. Dunno if there’s any other data typically exposed to car computers other than what that provides.


  • I don’t think that it has a cell modem, either, because it sounds like it eschews a baked-in entertainment computer:

    https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64564869/2027-slate-truck-revealed/

    Roll-down windows come standard, as do manually adjustable rearview mirrors. An audio or infotainment system is noticeably missing, too. Instead, your cellphone or tablet serves these functions, with a dock for the former included and one for the latter available as an optional accessory. Better like the sound coming out from your phone or tablet’s speakers, too, because the Slate lacks speakers, though the brand’s accessory division will gladly hook you up with a set.

    Honestly, if you took my last year of comments complaining about privacy-infringing cars and those complaining about changes to what a truck is, this does kind of look to be addressing both. Gotta see what the actual production vehicle is like in real life, of course, but…

    https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/mini-truckin-returns-slate-unveils-old-school-style-affordable-electric-pickup

    When I say the truck is small, I mean it. At 174.6 inches, it’s about 2 feet shorter in overall length than the 2025 Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz. And to use the Wayback Machine to a time when compact pickups were actually compact, it’s roughly the same size as the compact pickups of 1980: the Toyota truck, Chevy LUV and Ford Courier. Notably, no other automakers have offered trucks of this size in America since the mid 1990s.

    Yeah, like the “inexpensive, no-frills utility vehicle” that pickups originally were.





  • They can! We’ve got a nuclear power plant that evaporates water from sewage for cooling.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station

    The Palo Verde Generating Station is a nuclear power plant located near Tonopah, Arizona[5] about 45 miles (72 km) west of downtown Phoenix. Palo Verde generates the most electricity of any power plant in the United States per year, and is the largest power plant by net generation as of 2021.[6] Palo Verde has the third-highest rated capacity of any U.S power plant. It is a critical asset to the Southwest, generating approximately 32 million megawatt-hours annually.

    At its location in the Arizona desert, Palo Verde is the only nuclear generating facility in the world that is not located adjacent to a large body of above-ground water. The facility evaporates water from the treated sewage of several nearby municipalities to meet its cooling needs. Up to 26 billion US gallons (~100,000,000 m³) of treated water are evaporated each year.[12][13] This water represents about 25% of the annual overdraft of the Arizona Department of Water Resources Phoenix Active Management Area.[14] At the nuclear plant site, the wastewater is further treated and stored in an 85-acre (34 ha) reservoir and a 45-acre (18 ha) reservoir for use in the plant’s wet cooling towers.

    If you’re location-agnostic as to your datacenter, though, probably easier to just stick a datacenter by the ocean and use seawater, though. Lots of that.

    EDIT: Or make use of the waste heat instead of throwing it away. If it’s winter and you’re a town in Alaska, say, you’d probably just as soon have the heat piped your way.






  • because the real water savings never came from stupid showers:

    Another factor is that your shower water is very probably — unless you have some sort of gray-water irrigation system going on or something — heading to a sewage treatment plant, and if we wanted to do so, we can purify the water there, make that closed loop and feed back into the water supply, recover basically all the water from treatment.

    The UK does it:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/08/29/uk-drink-sewage-water-squeamish-wastewater-recycle/

    California and some other states are doing it:

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/california-is-set-to-become-2nd-state-to-approve-rules-for-turning-wastewater-into-drinking-water

    California has been using recycled wastewater for decades. The Ontario Reign minor league hockey team has used it to make ice for its rink in Southern California. Soda Springs Ski Resort near Lake Tahoe has used it to make snow. And farmers in the Central Valley, where much of the nation’s vegetables, fruits and nuts are grown, use it to water their crops.

    But it hasn’t been used directly for drinking water. Orange County operates a large water purification system that recycles wastewater and then uses it to refill underground aquifers. The water mingles with the groundwater for months before being pumped up and used for drinking water again.

    California’s new rules would let — but not require — water agencies to take wastewater, treat it, and then put it right back into the drinking water system. California would be just the second state to allow this, following Colorado.

    The new rules require the wastewater be treated for all pathogens and viruses, even if the pathogens and viruses aren’t in the wastewater. That’s different from regular water treatment rules, which only require treatment for known pathogens, said Darrin Polhemus, deputy director of the division of drinking water for the California Water Resources Control Board.

    In fact, the treatment is so stringent it removes all of the minerals that make fresh drinking water taste good — meaning they have to be added back at the end of the process.

    “It’s at the same drinking water quality, and probably better in many instances,” Polhemus said.

    Plus, in California and a lot of other places, we can (and do) desalinate water.

    https://www.sdcwa.org/your-water/local-water-supplies/seawater-desalination/

    In November 2012, the Water Authority approved a 30-year Water Purchase Agreement with Poseidon Water for the purchase of up to 56,000 acre-feet of desalinated seawater per year, approximately 10 percent of the San Diego region’s water demand.

    It costs more than pulling from a river, and that’s economically-difficult for agriculture…but it’s just not prohibitive for residential use, and there’s a whole ocean of water out there.

    https://www.sdcwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/desal-carlsbad-fs.pdf

    Based on current electricity cost estimates, the Water Purchase Agreement sets the price of water at about $3,400/ acre-feet for fiscal year 2024.

    An acre-foot of water will, depending upon where in the country you are — usage levels vary by area — supply about one to four households for a year at average usage. And that price is in California; electricity is a major input to desalination, and California has some of the highest electricity prices in the US, generally second only to Hawaii and something like double most of the country. It’ll be significantly cheaper to desalinate water in most other places.






  • Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack your enter key, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.