Specifically because the Japanese govt saw the pensions/retirement trainwreck that's engulfing the developed world coming 50 years ago and set policies to ensure that japanese saved for their retirement.
western governments have been selling a fraud since the 1970s to baby boomers that the future was covered in order to get away with misappropriating taxation and encouraging debt-driven spending.
"In the end what gave Germany its economic edge was its refusal to adopt minimum wage for so long"
It didn't need to. Even when minimum wage legislation was finally put into effect, the number of employers historically paying that level or below was tiny.
The driver for actually adopting minimum wage laws was the increase in ethically challenged american-style companies *ahem*amazon*ahem* which paid as little as they possibly could, resulting in employees needing state assistance. In a properly functioning economy this kind of corporate welfare leeching is frowned upon and the germans _definitely_ frown on it.
"Yes for applications maybe but I am talking about the actual numbers of arrivals and never mentioned applications."
If they don't apply for asylum, then they can't get benefits and as such they're not a burden on the taxpaying society, so your inference is moot.
Once granted asylum, refugees are entitled to work and almost all of them do. Looking across history on all countries, immigrants (refugees or otherwise) have always been a powerhouse for the economy they come into. The myth of "drain on our resources" is just that - a myth - usually perpetuated by xenophobes.
MOVs have to be rated higher than the expected sinusoudal _peak_ voltage.
For most mains circuits the allowable RMS deviation is "nominal" RMS -10%+15%, which means that peaks need to be sized appropriately. If the supply isn't clean then the peak might be slightly higher still.
This brings up an important point for a lot of cheap chinese electronics rated for "220V" or "220-240V" - Whilst the supply in the UK is a nominal 220V, my house's _normal_ line voltage is 245VAC and it can go as high as 265VAC whilst still being within allowable power system tolerances (this is applicable across europe, but most of the EU centres on 220V whilst the UK centres on 230V, as do a lot of ex-british colonies)
I've told chinese suppliers that the line voltage here is 245V and the standard response is that "this is out of spec" - when you point out the legally allowable variations in supply voltages(*) you can almost hear their heads exploding. Far too much single-voltage kit is made on the basis of "nominal +-5%" and that's simply not safe.
(*) Most "developed country" mains noise and voltage excursion standards were written in the 1930s, when "electronics" simply wasn't sensitive to any of these kinds of things.
Stupidly high circuit currents for starters, resulting in having to use heavier switchgear and much heavier wiring to avoid excessive circuit losses and heating issues. losing 10V in a 220V circuit isn't an issue, but in a 110V circuit it can take you out of supply tolerance.
The actual domestic feed into a USA house is 220V, not 110V. It's centretapped to provide 2 "pseudo phases". This has resulted in some parts of the world that started on a US system having 220V 60Hz supplies on NEMA sockets (be warned if you're in the Philippines or Thailand)
110/115V was originally used on Edison's DC supplies, because higher than that started having major problems controlling arcing when things were switched off
DC arcs are self sustaining. AC arcs self-quench every half cycle. This is why the same switch will have wildly differing AC/DC current ratings on the rating plate - the AC rating is what can pass through the contacts, whilst the DC one is about how fast and how far apart they open, in order to be able to safely switch whatever's being controlled OFF.
Trivia: Whilst Edison was running around telling people Tesla's AC was dangerous and electrocuting dogs to prove it, 2-3 electricians per month were being killed by the "safe" DC supply system.
Yes, 200V on a 110V circuit is a surge, but most "typical" surges are 2kV or higher common mode (both lines going high relative to earth) due to lightning strikes.
Sustained higher voltage surges on low voltage lines are normally a result of 11kV distribution lines falling on local feeders. The best you can hope for in such cases is that the fuses do their job before your wiring catches fire.
My experience is that power lines don't get much in the way of surges - there are so many transformers along the way that ground point are plentiful.
Comms lines are another matter entirely. In another lifetime (as a telco tech) I used to routinely see smoking wires hanging in mid air where a line card used to be and it's not at all uncommon to find black arc tracks inside modems or phones after a strike.
Most surge arrestors work fine for the first hit, but self destruct whilst doing so and don't block the second and third ones a few hundred milliseconds later. In addition they tend to interfere with line characteristics and cheap ones often badly screw up DSL circuits.
For "wrong voltage" on a power circuit (200V on 110V, etc) that's what fuses exist for. Surge arrestors are supposed to clamp short period , high impulse transients.
Myanmar - The situation described is what you find in Yangon, Napidaw and Mandalay. Once you get outside the 2 largest cities & the capital, connectivity is even worse.
Even outside the USA, in deepest darkest bumfuskistan, there are places where the _fastest_ you can get is 2MB/s for $100/month - which is 5 times the average monthly wage in the parts I'm thinking of, so only normally found on business premises. That bandwidth goes to shit when you have a couple of office lan boxes trying to run windows updates.
Everyone else uses tethered data-over-mobile at 0.5c/Mb and that adds up pretty bloody fast when windows is trying to download win10 no matter how much you tell it not to do that.
Not theoretical. I've just come back from a country that's exactly like that - and Netflix have set up local shop there. How they expect to sell anything is a good question. Nobody torrents. It's just too expensive.
Oak Ridge has been ramping up research into molten salts for quite a while and the chinese are pouring tens of millions of dollars into R&D on this tech.
There are at least a dozen research outfits looking at variants on the design too. The original design worked really well but it can be made smaller, with no graphite (even less fire hazard) and no dump tank requirement, whilst still having the ability to load-follow.
The first practical fission power reactor cost a LOT more than thast in today's money. It was only about 8MW and it powered submarines.
It SHOULD have stayed small or as an engineering prototype. Instead it got scaled up to drive civil steam plants instead of burning coal. The problem with scaling up pressure vessels is that the engineering requirements trend exponentially with the size.
"Whether it's fast breeder reactors or long term storage, there's still an issue around the transport of waste from hundreds of sites to the disposal sites."
If you process the "waste" onsite as you generate it (which is what continuous cycle MSRs would do), then transportation isn't an issue and by separating the various products you can sell them off in a few years when residual radioactivity has died down.
If you use thorium cycles then the amount of waste you need to deal with in the end is reduced by 98-99% AND you reduce wastage on the input side by staggering amounts too (thanks to uranium civil nuke systems needing enriched fuel, ~60% of what goes into the enrichment plant never sees the inside of a reactor and is "waste" too, without even considering the staggering amounts of energy required to run the enrichment plants - so high that the USA regards those costs as a military secret, whereas the average rare earth mine pulls enough "nuisance thorium byproduct" out of the ground each _year_ to power the entire world's current(*) electrical requirements and the thorium needs no special processing before being fed into the salt-making plant.
(*) There are dozens of rare earth mines. Current electrical demands would need to be multiplied by a factor of at least ten to cater to a more-electric future with less carbon burning.
The basic problem is that whilst the uranium cycle works, it's a bitch to recycle the fuel.
As a proof of concept or low-production rate system using the same stuff you use for weapons it's ok, but it doesn't scale.
Think of it as a Neucomen steam engine, vs the Watt engine of Molten Fuel Salt systems. Continuous reprocessing is the only way to keep things running efficiently and at low risk.
Anything involving water at high temperatures, high pressures (where it wants to flash to steam at the slightest opportunity), borated (and thus even more corrosive than mere live steam) and mixing with Zirconium (which wants to end up being hydrogen and various oxides) is a BAD idea at the best of times, let alone when there are radioactive contaminants dissolved in there. Getting rid of the water by swapping it out for molten sodium wasn't exactly a bright move either.
Nuclear waste issues are overblown: The hot stuff gets to be not-hot relatively quickly and the not-hot stuff is relatively benign from a radiological point of view (biological issues on heavy metals are another matter).
The amount of wastage in the uranium cycle itself is a big problem (enriching is energy intensive and U238 (depleted uranium) is an essential component of hydrogen bombs as well as a toxic heavy metal) that would be addressed by getting away from water-based reactor systems (chemical separation is much easier than isotopic) and issues of Tritium generation from lithium could possibly be handled by chemically binding it before it escapes the (unpressurised) vessel.
All the windmills in the world won't solve the issue of energy requirements if we allow a budget of 2000kWh per person per year (most of us in the west do that in a fortnight) that's estimated to be the knee point of eliminating world poverty.
The best speed bumps are 12 to 15 feet across and 6 inches high in the middle. The faster you go, the bigger the launch.
The stupid 12 inch across ones have less effect on a car the faster the car's going when it encounters them.
The downside is that people slow down for them and then floor it afterwards, making for pollution hotspots and noise issues.
The fastest way to slow down traffic is quite simple:
1: Widen the footpaths to make... 2...the road width narrow enough so that when cars are parked on both sides, traffic can't travel in both directions. 3: Put a high curb to make sure assholes don't park on the footpath, however a few sets of footprints over the vehicle can make the point quite well.
"Earth orbit is slightly changing 'right now' in a way that the next 'ice age' either wont come for a very long time, or will be the last for a very long time"
We'll continue having glacial periods as long as the continents are arranged the way they are - the southern circumpolar current being a particularly strong driver.
Once ocean currents are forced to pass through both tropical and polar latitudes, things will be more "normal" in long-term climactic terms. - that's going to be at least another 10 million years (or more) away though.
In the meantime, consider this factor apart from the obvious "global warming, sea level rises" one:
In geological history, _every_ time there's a record of rapid atmospheric CO2 spikes, there's been a global oceanic anoxic event too. When does ours start?
"When you actually look at what was in the film, it was just a generic action movie with the Bond name stuck on it"
Which is what the audience wanted to see. Ditto the huge number of Jet LI or Chow Yun Fat movies. You know when you go in that it's all about the fight scenes, not the plot.
In the case of Bond movies, its worth bearing in mind that there was no such thing as a James Bond novel. They're books of short stories of various "Bond" events and the "Bond" in the story isn't necessarily the same one all the way through that book (ie: James Bond is simply a generic name for "Random MI6 agent") - and in fact it's not necessary that he survived the story in question, which is why you see such improbable plot twists in the movies to explain how it all ties together.
A lot of the subtle CGI is this: Removing supporting structures from final shots.
A classic example is the senate hearing scene in Contact. The pillars in the hearing room were swathed in cables and lighting when filmed. CGI was used to take them all out, so that what was seen is what would normally be seen.
Bad CGI (and bad practical effects) are generally noticeable when the laws of newtonian physics are so blatently ignored that we notice at least subconciously, but not so blatently ignored that we can conciously discount them as part of the willing suspension of disbelief that the movies require. They're jarring and THAT'S why we don't like them.
Going to older movies and seeing CGI or matte which shows because we expect better detailing is a different matter. The first time around they were good enough and trying to remake them to satisfy a contemporary audience risks the film being jarring when future audiences watch and notice the detailing which shouldn't be there but doesn't match _their_ expectations of higher quality CGI.
It does, BUT the idea of a "natural balance" - ie, that "nature will move back to an equilibrium point if disturbed" has been debunked for more than 50 years.
There is no "return to" point and there never has been. If things change they stay changed until something else changes. The primary lesson from studying the past of this planet is that everything constantly changes everything else and the planet doesn't care if those changes make things untenable for particular forms of life (such as us).
You don't need bloody great rocks from space or a nuclear war to render the planet uninhabitable(*). We're doing a good job of it already without needing them.
The variation caused by Maunder minima is measurable but too small to push things around much.
In particular it's not enough to account for the little ice age (which was regional anyway, not global). Current thinking is that it was mostly caused by volcanic eruptions but there's a possibility that gulf stream disturbances triggered by northwest atlantic freshwater incursions might have come into play.
A Maunder minimum at the moment would gain some extra years delay dealing with global warming but the reality is that the 2 degree target is already blown and we're pretty much fucked.
Apart from the sea level rises (which take decades to be noticed) a more pressing issue is that almost every CO2 spike in the geological record has an accompanying global anoxic oceanic event (the last one is what gave us most of the oil fields being exploited) and an accompanying dieoff of large terrestrial/aquatic animals. It's hard to put the timings together on "thousands" let alone "hundreds" of years from fossils so it's hard to tell how close those events have happened in the past, but there're already indications of deepwater dead zones starting to spread.
It may well be that sea level rises won't matter because there won't be enough people left around to notice them.
For things like a RV and longhaul trucking, IC-electric hybrids make even more sense than on cars. The engine can be "rightsized" for the constant load, charging batteries when it's underloaded (using a small donkey engine may even be practical) and using those batteries for added power where needed.
Slashdot Mirror
"They also have huge savings rates"
Specifically because the Japanese govt saw the pensions/retirement trainwreck that's engulfing the developed world coming 50 years ago and set policies to ensure that japanese saved for their retirement.
western governments have been selling a fraud since the 1970s to baby boomers that the future was covered in order to get away with misappropriating taxation and encouraging debt-driven spending.
"In the end what gave Germany its economic edge was its refusal to adopt minimum wage for so long"
It didn't need to. Even when minimum wage legislation was finally put into effect, the number of employers historically paying that level or below was tiny.
The driver for actually adopting minimum wage laws was the increase in ethically challenged american-style companies *ahem*amazon*ahem* which paid as little as they possibly could, resulting in employees needing state assistance. In a properly functioning economy this kind of corporate welfare leeching is frowned upon and the germans _definitely_ frown on it.
"Yes for applications maybe but I am talking about the actual numbers of arrivals and never mentioned applications."
If they don't apply for asylum, then they can't get benefits and as such they're not a burden on the taxpaying society, so your inference is moot.
Once granted asylum, refugees are entitled to work and almost all of them do. Looking across history on all countries, immigrants (refugees or otherwise) have always been a powerhouse for the economy they come into. The myth of "drain on our resources" is just that - a myth - usually perpetuated by xenophobes.
MOVs have to be rated higher than the expected sinusoudal _peak_ voltage.
For most mains circuits the allowable RMS deviation is "nominal" RMS -10%+15%, which means that peaks need to be sized appropriately. If the supply isn't clean then the peak might be slightly higher still.
This brings up an important point for a lot of cheap chinese electronics rated for "220V" or "220-240V" - Whilst the supply in the UK is a nominal 220V, my house's _normal_ line voltage is 245VAC and it can go as high as 265VAC whilst still being within allowable power system tolerances (this is applicable across europe, but most of the EU centres on 220V whilst the UK centres on 230V, as do a lot of ex-british colonies)
I've told chinese suppliers that the line voltage here is 245V and the standard response is that "this is out of spec" - when you point out the legally allowable variations in supply voltages(*) you can almost hear their heads exploding. Far too much single-voltage kit is made on the basis of "nominal +-5%" and that's simply not safe.
(*) Most "developed country" mains noise and voltage excursion standards were written in the 1930s, when "electronics" simply wasn't sensitive to any of these kinds of things.
"I've never had the fuse blow..."
Fuses and circuit breakers are there to protect the wiring and prevent a fire.
They're not there to protect devices.
"Also, nobody uses 110"
I point you to parts of South America and certain areas in Japan.
> And why is 115 a "bad idea"?
Stupidly high circuit currents for starters, resulting in having to use heavier switchgear and much heavier wiring to avoid excessive circuit losses and heating issues. losing 10V in a 220V circuit isn't an issue, but in a 110V circuit it can take you out of supply tolerance.
The actual domestic feed into a USA house is 220V, not 110V. It's centretapped to provide 2 "pseudo phases". This has resulted in some parts of the world that started on a US system having 220V 60Hz supplies on NEMA sockets (be warned if you're in the Philippines or Thailand)
110/115V was originally used on Edison's DC supplies, because higher than that started having major problems controlling arcing when things were switched off
DC arcs are self sustaining. AC arcs self-quench every half cycle. This is why the same switch will have wildly differing AC/DC current ratings on the rating plate - the AC rating is what can pass through the contacts, whilst the DC one is about how fast and how far apart they open, in order to be able to safely switch whatever's being controlled OFF.
Trivia: Whilst Edison was running around telling people Tesla's AC was dangerous and electrocuting dogs to prove it, 2-3 electricians per month were being killed by the "safe" DC supply system.
Yes, 200V on a 110V circuit is a surge, but most "typical" surges are 2kV or higher common mode (both lines going high relative to earth) due to lightning strikes.
Sustained higher voltage surges on low voltage lines are normally a result of 11kV distribution lines falling on local feeders. The best you can hope for in such cases is that the fuses do their job before your wiring catches fire.
My experience is that power lines don't get much in the way of surges - there are so many transformers along the way that ground point are plentiful.
Comms lines are another matter entirely. In another lifetime (as a telco tech) I used to routinely see smoking wires hanging in mid air where a line card used to be and it's not at all uncommon to find black arc tracks inside modems or phones after a strike.
Most surge arrestors work fine for the first hit, but self destruct whilst doing so and don't block the second and third ones a few hundred milliseconds later. In addition they tend to interfere with line characteristics and cheap ones often badly screw up DSL circuits.
For "wrong voltage" on a power circuit (200V on 110V, etc) that's what fuses exist for. Surge arrestors are supposed to clamp short period , high impulse transients.
Myanmar - The situation described is what you find in Yangon, Napidaw and Mandalay.
Once you get outside the 2 largest cities & the capital, connectivity is even worse.
Even outside the USA, in deepest darkest bumfuskistan, there are places where the _fastest_ you can get is 2MB/s for $100/month - which is 5 times the average monthly wage in the parts I'm thinking of, so only normally found on business premises. That bandwidth goes to shit when you have a couple of office lan boxes trying to run windows updates.
Everyone else uses tethered data-over-mobile at 0.5c/Mb and that adds up pretty bloody fast when windows is trying to download win10 no matter how much you tell it not to do that.
Not theoretical. I've just come back from a country that's exactly like that - and Netflix have set up local shop there. How they expect to sell anything is a good question. Nobody torrents. It's just too expensive.
" the tech-we-won't-use, a LFTR."
Oak Ridge has been ramping up research into molten salts for quite a while and the chinese are pouring tens of millions of dollars into R&D on this tech.
There are at least a dozen research outfits looking at variants on the design too. The original design worked really well but it can be made smaller, with no graphite (even less fire hazard) and no dump tank requirement, whilst still having the ability to load-follow.
The first practical fission power reactor cost a LOT more than thast in today's money. It was only about 8MW and it powered submarines.
It SHOULD have stayed small or as an engineering prototype. Instead it got scaled up to drive civil steam plants instead of burning coal. The problem with scaling up pressure vessels is that the engineering requirements trend exponentially with the size.
"Whether it's fast breeder reactors or long term storage, there's still an issue around the transport of waste from hundreds of sites to the disposal sites."
If you process the "waste" onsite as you generate it (which is what continuous cycle MSRs would do), then transportation isn't an issue and by separating the various products you can sell them off in a few years when residual radioactivity has died down.
If you use thorium cycles then the amount of waste you need to deal with in the end is reduced by 98-99% AND you reduce wastage on the input side by staggering amounts too (thanks to uranium civil nuke systems needing enriched fuel, ~60% of what goes into the enrichment plant never sees the inside of a reactor and is "waste" too, without even considering the staggering amounts of energy required to run the enrichment plants - so high that the USA regards those costs as a military secret, whereas the average rare earth mine pulls enough "nuisance thorium byproduct" out of the ground each _year_ to power the entire world's current(*) electrical requirements and the thorium needs no special processing before being fed into the salt-making plant.
(*) There are dozens of rare earth mines. Current electrical demands would need to be multiplied by a factor of at least ten to cater to a more-electric future with less carbon burning.
The basic problem is that whilst the uranium cycle works, it's a bitch to recycle the fuel.
As a proof of concept or low-production rate system using the same stuff you use for weapons it's ok, but it doesn't scale.
Think of it as a Neucomen steam engine, vs the Watt engine of Molten Fuel Salt systems. Continuous reprocessing is the only way to keep things running efficiently and at low risk.
Anything involving water at high temperatures, high pressures (where it wants to flash to steam at the slightest opportunity), borated (and thus even more corrosive than mere live steam) and mixing with Zirconium (which wants to end up being hydrogen and various oxides) is a BAD idea at the best of times, let alone when there are radioactive contaminants dissolved in there. Getting rid of the water by swapping it out for molten sodium wasn't exactly a bright move either.
Nuclear waste issues are overblown: The hot stuff gets to be not-hot relatively quickly and the not-hot stuff is relatively benign from a radiological point of view (biological issues on heavy metals are another matter).
The amount of wastage in the uranium cycle itself is a big problem (enriching is energy intensive and U238 (depleted uranium) is an essential component of hydrogen bombs as well as a toxic heavy metal) that would be addressed by getting away from water-based reactor systems (chemical separation is much easier than isotopic) and issues of Tritium generation from lithium could possibly be handled by chemically binding it before it escapes the (unpressurised) vessel.
All the windmills in the world won't solve the issue of energy requirements if we allow a budget of 2000kWh per person per year (most of us in the west do that in a fortnight) that's estimated to be the knee point of eliminating world poverty.
The best speed bumps are 12 to 15 feet across and 6 inches high in the middle. The faster you go, the bigger the launch.
The stupid 12 inch across ones have less effect on a car the faster the car's going when it encounters them.
The downside is that people slow down for them and then floor it afterwards, making for pollution hotspots and noise issues.
The fastest way to slow down traffic is quite simple:
1: Widen the footpaths to make... ...the road width narrow enough so that when cars are parked on both sides, traffic can't travel in both directions.
2
3: Put a high curb to make sure assholes don't park on the footpath, however a few sets of footprints over the vehicle can make the point quite well.
Instant slowdown. no speedbumps needed
"Earth orbit is slightly changing 'right now' in a way that the next 'ice age' either wont come for a very long time, or will be the last for a very long time"
We'll continue having glacial periods as long as the continents are arranged the way they are - the southern circumpolar current being a particularly strong driver.
Once ocean currents are forced to pass through both tropical and polar latitudes, things will be more "normal" in long-term climactic terms. - that's going to be at least another 10 million years (or more) away though.
In the meantime, consider this factor apart from the obvious "global warming, sea level rises" one:
In geological history, _every_ time there's a record of rapid atmospheric CO2 spikes, there's been a global oceanic anoxic event too. When does ours start?
"When you actually look at what was in the film, it was just a generic action movie with the Bond name stuck on it"
Which is what the audience wanted to see. Ditto the huge number of Jet LI or Chow Yun Fat movies. You know when you go in that it's all about the fight scenes, not the plot.
In the case of Bond movies, its worth bearing in mind that there was no such thing as a James Bond novel. They're books of short stories of various "Bond" events and the "Bond" in the story isn't necessarily the same one all the way through that book (ie: James Bond is simply a generic name for "Random MI6 agent") - and in fact it's not necessary that he survived the story in question, which is why you see such improbable plot twists in the movies to explain how it all ties together.
"the failure of directors, writers, producers, etc., who specifically insert superfluous effects"
Effects, explosions and boobs have always been used to distract from a rotten plot.
A lot of the subtle CGI is this: Removing supporting structures from final shots.
A classic example is the senate hearing scene in Contact. The pillars in the hearing room were swathed in cables and lighting when filmed. CGI was used to take them all out, so that what was seen is what would normally be seen.
Bad CGI (and bad practical effects) are generally noticeable when the laws of newtonian physics are so blatently ignored that we notice at least subconciously, but not so blatently ignored that we can conciously discount them as part of the willing suspension of disbelief that the movies require. They're jarring and THAT'S why we don't like them.
Going to older movies and seeing CGI or matte which shows because we expect better detailing is a different matter. The first time around they were good enough and trying to remake them to satisfy a contemporary audience risks the film being jarring when future audiences watch and notice the detailing which shouldn't be there but doesn't match _their_ expectations of higher quality CGI.
"Earth has a ton of feedback systems."
It does, BUT the idea of a "natural balance" - ie, that "nature will move back to an equilibrium point if disturbed" has been debunked for more than 50 years.
There is no "return to" point and there never has been. If things change they stay changed until something else changes. The primary lesson from studying the past of this planet is that everything constantly changes everything else and the planet doesn't care if those changes make things untenable for particular forms of life (such as us).
You don't need bloody great rocks from space or a nuclear war to render the planet uninhabitable(*). We're doing a good job of it already without needing them.
(*) Uninhabitable for us. Life will always adapt.
Will always be lost.
The variation caused by Maunder minima is measurable but too small to push things around much.
In particular it's not enough to account for the little ice age (which was regional anyway, not global). Current thinking is that it was mostly caused by volcanic eruptions but there's a possibility that gulf stream disturbances triggered by northwest atlantic freshwater incursions might have come into play.
A Maunder minimum at the moment would gain some extra years delay dealing with global warming but the reality is that the 2 degree target is already blown and we're pretty much fucked.
Apart from the sea level rises (which take decades to be noticed) a more pressing issue is that almost every CO2 spike in the geological record has an accompanying global anoxic oceanic event (the last one is what gave us most of the oil fields being exploited) and an accompanying dieoff of large terrestrial/aquatic animals. It's hard to put the timings together on "thousands" let alone "hundreds" of years from fossils so it's hard to tell how close those events have happened in the past, but there're already indications of deepwater dead zones starting to spread.
It may well be that sea level rises won't matter because there won't be enough people left around to notice them.
Or in other words:
Volvo: Great for protecting you in a crash, but crap for keeping you out of one in the first place.
IIRC that was a Top Gear quote from Richard Hammond.
"ABS will not necessarily stop a vehicle on ice."
ABS, ESP and all the other bits won't make a blind bit of difference if you hit black ice on a bend, even at 10mph
Been there, done that.
For things like a RV and longhaul trucking, IC-electric hybrids make even more sense than on cars. The engine can be "rightsized" for the constant load, charging batteries when it's underloaded (using a small donkey engine may even be practical) and using those batteries for added power where needed.