Chamber pressures for the 5.56 Nato is 58,000psi. And 9mm is 35,000psi. It takes a pretty good piece of pipe to contain those pressures. Your average seam welded pipe is around 4000 to maybe 10,000 psi.

Zip guns made from hardware store pipe are just barely good enough to contain a low pressure 12ga bird shot shell.

I mean, if you ain’t drowning in it, are you really working? And if you are, you should get off your ass and work harder so we can drop more work on you!

There is no real way to know about telemetry until they really get out in the wild. But, I wouldn’t think it will have much because of the minimalist design and approach to marketing. It also helps there is just one model that can be either a 2 door pickup or an SUV with some extra bolt on parts and only one paint color-- body wraps extra. And I think they have hit the sweet spot in battery options. You can get the standard 150-mile pack or the 240-mile pack. Most urban dwellers would be just fine with the standard 150 range. While still giving those of us that live in rural areas the ability to have just enough extra range to make those longer round trips we often need to drive.

I think the biggest thing they have done is to re-imagine just what customers want and how to actually manufacture it. It’s a throw-back idea about not selling expensive packages for multiple models, but one model that comes just one color. But you can choose to add things, or not, as you want them. And they, so far, want the customer to have the power to repair or add items and do the work themselves.

As I said, I do suspect the majority of Slates sold will be $30,000+US due to the pretty clever old school marketing method of letting customers choose what to factory install when ordering. A very good way to get people to over spend on wants and not real needs. The profit margins on installing radios is a lot less than letting the customer upsell themselves on those fancy rims and aggressive tires.

It’s a bold experiment in the automotive industry in the US. I think it can work and work well. There is a huge gap in the automotive market at the low end price range that simply isn’t being exploited. Slate can be the one to stake a claim to it.

The only one I can think of is the Slate. But they aren’t quite ready to open the doors to buyers just yet. They do claim manufacturing to start late this year. Though you can reserve a build for $50. They claim base price in the mid US$20K. Though I would think most will sell out the door for $30K to $35K when you start adding all the customizations most will go for.

I have hopes for Slate.

An application of hair dry heat will make the white marks go away.

Yeah, the USPS won’t deliver my mail to my home, no rural free delivery for me. It cost me $160 a year to rent a mailbox in town plus the gas to get there and home again. And you expect a container ship to show up out here? UPS and FedEx only deliver here. God willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

No, the requirements aren’t that low. But there are levels of nursing. Each requiring different levels of education and licensing. From LPN, Licensed Practical Nurse the entry level that takes about a year, to RN, Registered Nurse, can take 2 to 4 years. A 4 year BS degree is a degreed RN. Then you can continue to other licensing degrees like RN-P, Registered Nurse Practitioner-- with a limited doctor scope of medicine to take the pressure off of General Practitioner doctors. And a host of specialties nurses can go into. With median wages around $90,000US. And easy opportunities to earn well over $100,00US per year.

Much of the staffing issues centers around many nurses wanting to only work 20 to 25 hours a week. I have a friend that was head of a nursing department in a hospital for many years, and she was always complaining that she couldn’t get nurses to work more than 30 hours a week. And most refused to work more than 25 hours.

We use trucks because of the “last mile” problem. Ships are the most efficient. But you ain’t pulling up a container ship to your front door. Same with trains. Both are great at moving a lot of stuff from one major point to another. But not good at all for local delivery.

Nor are they good for fast delivery of smaller amounts. And y’all want your Amazon shit delivered as fast as possible to your door. Or the arugula and potatoes you will buy at your local grocery for supper tonight. I’m not pumping up trucks, but they make that possible.

Logistics is tiered and integrated every last inch of the way.

Yep. He is doing the Rockefeller to buy his legacy. Tossing coins to children for photo ops and building libraries and schools to put his name on.

It’s a start. It may take time to make it work for “everyday” use, but if it’s possible now, it can be done better in the future.

Yeah, you’ve been lazy along with me. I wanted another one of their shaving brushes. I think they still offer badger hair shaving brushes. For real natural brushes you have your choice of either badger hair or boar bristle. Badger is the most popular for shaving brushes followed by boar which is stiffer and can feel “scritchier” if you are looking for that. Though it takes a bit of use to get a good boar brush’s bristles to start splitting at the tips and then it provides a soft feel.

Those people that dislike the fact that the boar and badger need to be all in on making a shaving brush, favor the synthetics. And I do have a couple that I find pretty nice. But there is a difference in the feel between natural hair/bristle and plastic.

My understanding of history and pacifists, (which may or not be right), is that no pacifist movement has ever “won” a revolution by peaceful means themselves. It always takes a group of people who are willing to use violence and die in the process if need be to achieve the desired ends to back the pacifists up.

Popular modern peaceful movements led by people such as Martin Luther King in the US and Ghandi in colonial India were parallel backed by violent groups such as the Black Panthers in the US and a bunch of small and very active violent groups in India.

And the only reason we know and remember Ghandi and King and hold them up as shining examples of pacifism, is because the powers that be decided it was easier and more beneficial to negotiate with them rather than the more violent factions. After all, that could get you killed outright trying to negotiate with the violent leaders or at least totally ousted from power at best. Dealing with the pacifists was a good way to stay alive and maintain at least some power if not all of it. But until those in power are convinced they can die because enough of the population is actively trying to kill them, they don’t much care about talking to the pacifists. I mean, what are they going to do? Carry signs and march for a few days? Oh! The horror! If that worked, Trump would be in jail by now.

Until enough of the populace is angry enough to take up arms and risk death to kill those evil people in power, nothing will change. There will be no reason to make deals or vacate the power for the pacifists to occupy.

But there still remains the problem of the violent people the pacifists now need to deal with. And those people have the taste of blood. This is the weak point in any revolution…

Yes, every time a horse needs to be groomed, it’s a death sentence for them. Well, some horses think they coulda’ had died. It coulda’ happened that way you know. But they all somehow survive.

Interestingly enough, or not, at one time horse hair was the most popular material to make all kinds of brushes out. There were millions of horses, and they all needed to have their manes and tails groomed and cut several times a year. So there was a renewable and never ending supply. People were happy, and the horses were happy.

But, then came WW1. And along with all the guns, artillery, and ammunition needed to feed these engines death and destruction, copious amounts of other far more mundane items were also required by soldiers. And one of those mundane items were shaving brushes.

Soldiers are required to shave every day no matter what. So that meant every solider needed a shaving kit. This meant the military needed to supply a razor, blades, shaving soap, and a shaving brush to every solider. And the cheapest and most abundant brush to buy in bulk, was horse hair. But there soon was a problem.

Turns out all that patriotic horses were being sent to war to get killed just like all the men. And that in the western world, horse hair quickly was in short supply. And the soldiers still needed shaving brushes.

So, the brush factories started importing horse hair brushes from the Far East, mainly China. And because the Chinese either didn’t understand that horse hair needs to be sterilized, or it was just Chinese businessmen being Chinese, they skipped that step and didn’t tell anyone. And soon soldiers were being infected with tetanus and dying at an alarming rate. It is one thing to send your soldiers to die in the face of machine-gun fire, and a whole 'nother thing to waste them dying from tetanus infected shaving brushes instead. So they panicked switched to boar bristle brushes instead.

And so great was the fear of cheap imported horse hair shaving brushes from the Orient, that the US passed a Federal law banning the importation of horse hair brushes or horse hair and even the manufacture of those brushes in the US. A prohibition that lasted until recently. Other nations enacted similar bans or implemented strict rules regarding in manufacture and sale. And so horse hair shaving brushes faded from consumers minds.

The last horse hair shaving brush manufacturer in the west, an old Spanish company-- Vie-Long, finally quit making them a few years ago now. (I own and regularly use 3 of them). So new horse hair shaving brushes are now extinct. And that includes the rare and heavily fetishized horse hair tooth brushes.

Fortunately, you can get synthetic shaving knots and tooth brushes that very good these days. And so people with those peculiar fetishes can continue their private kinks.

To be fair…

Electricians are worse. They will loudly complain that whoever the prior work did a terrible job, and it doesn’t pass code. Even if they were the elec-chicken that did it. I swear it’s a legal requirement.

I’ve been using it for years. But I have been waiting for this day to come. Because it always comes at some point without fail.

I was there at the very beginning. I watched the rise of today. From playing Oregon Trail on a teletype computer head in a dingy basement, trying to learn Basic, writing batch files, compiling kernels, and rpm hell.

The Badgers were amazing and mesmerizing and are truly worthy of preservation.

Oh, the consumer companies care. But they currently don’t matter anymore that we do. And let’s be honest, the if and when this AI bubble does pop and all the data centers have closed. The prices will drop enough for consumers to eat up the sudden surplus as if a dam broke because it will “feel cheap and a bargain”. There is no lose-lose here for DRAM manufacturers because consumers ain’t that bright.

It might. But I don’t think there has been much of a cooling for Bambu’s market share. There are plenty of fanbois and their marketing IS effective for first time buyers.

There are gems. I sometimes need to do things I don’t often do in FreeCAD. A quick refresher from Mango, and I’m back in the groove.

“60% of gamers have no plans to build a computer for the foreseeable future.” The unspoken part is, “and the hardware manufacturers don’t care”. Maybe they will after the bubble pops, or maybe not.

I just bought a mini desktop-- Ryzen 5 with 16Gb memory and 1Tb SSD. It cost me almost $500US. It probably was $100 less last year. I’m not a gamer, but I do make heavy use of 3D CAD and sometimes with large assemblies. And my old Nitro 5 and 1650 nVidia had been starting to struggle.

I do like my new little computer, with Aurora 44 installed, win11 was aborted on first boot, it’s a snappy little box despite the modest specs. The downside is, there isn’t enough time to make a cuppa tea while waiting on a model regen.

And who knows, I may live long enough to afford another stick of ram, or I may win the lottery someday-- assuming I buy a lottery ticket first.