Tesla owner here: Your math is way off - 230V at 400 amps is 92KW. Charging is maybe 95% efficient.If your 85 KWH Tesla battery was near empty if would take about an hour to fill at that rate. Longer in realitity, as the charge rate decreases as you approach full. Tesla's supercharger stations supply a maximum of 120KW during the initial 15-30 minutes, then taper down to be nice to the battery. The "hose" at the supercharger kiosk is similar to a gas station hose, and delivers about 360VDC at 330 amps Supercharger locations have up to 10 spots, so the local utility has to provide a feed of 1.2 MW to such a location That's a 30 amps per leg on a three phase circuit at 12.5 KV, 30 amp wiring is quite modest in diameter. In US units that's a 10 gauge wire (0.101 inches in diameter)
The way the law is now written, the only way for the feds to collect the fine/tax if you don't pay is to withhold it from your tax refund. They are specifically prohibited from trying to collect by garnishing your wages, sucking it out of your back account or any other method. There is no criminal penalty either. You can't be arrested for not buying insurance.If you are a subsistence farmer living off grid there is no way they can make you to buy the insurance, and no way to penalize you if you don't. And you can still show up at an emergency room and get treated. The law is without a doubt designed to push folks towards buying - but "forced"? I don't think that is an accurate characterization
Serious question: in the late 18th century did "arms" only mean "firearms" Or does the second amendment protect my right to walk around wherever I want with a machete or a battle axe?
The only good answer I found on this thread. I'm married to a high level tax professional. She has decades of experience and works with the most complex returns for corporations and for high wealth individuals. She has researched and answered this question for several clients, and the answer is always the same - "it depends." Depends on all the factors above, and more. And just as the concluding sentence by ShainghaiBill says, each case is treated individually and there is no absolute line that can be drawn. Uber has enough money to argue this in a higher court, and I'm sure they will. Looking beyond Uber, the general trend to turn all workers into contractors is more of a political than legal debate. We, as a society, need to decide how much to go the Libertarian route vs a more regulated route. Uber vs California Labor Commission is just one skirmish in a much bigger battle. Personally I think we need the kind of worker protections the California Labor Commission is saying apply to Uber drivers - and I AM an independent contractor, sole proprietor.
I attended UC Irvine in the early 1970's. Tuition was $618/year. Inflation adjust about 9:1, and tuition was about $5600/yr in 2015 money. My son graduated from Cal Poly SLO last year. Tuition was about $8500/yr. So his schooling was definitely more expensive than mine, but not absurdly so.
I'm an IT consultant (AKA Computer Guy) with quite a few "trade" companies as my customers. Auto repair shops, body shops, plumbers, electricians, painters, plumbers, roofers etc. In my area (Marin County CA) they are all hurting for qualified workers. Jobs here for taking for anyone who knows their trade. They will have to commute an hour to work if they want semi-affordable housing, but the jobs are available.
You need investing advice more than career advice. After 10 years of work you should have much more than a three month cushion - It sound like you have fallen into the trap of allowing your expenses to grow to consume all current income. That is going to be hard to reverse, and THAT is what you need some professional help with,
At 60 Hz skin effect is essentially nonexistent. There is no physical reason why AC at that frequency would work better (or worse) with a copper clad aluminum conductor. At 60 Hz the whole conductor is used by the AC - there will be just as much current flowing down the center as down the skin. The only reason the aluminum wire is clad with copper is that aluminum oxide is a very good insulator, and bare aluminum gets an oxide coating within minutes in our oxygen rich world. Copper oxide is a pretty good conductor, and does not (in the thin layer that occurs) impede connections. Bare aluminum wire was made infamous for causing fires in homes, when connections became high resistance (where the wire connected to a switch or outlet). I don't believe bare aluminum is allowed by most building codes anymore. CCA has replaced it.. BTW - the only reason to use aluminum at all is cost. Aluminum is much cheaper than copper. Also much inferior as a conductor, with about twice the resistance. The cladding on CCA is not thick enough to significantly offset this deficit, so for a given amperage, copper clad aluminum has to be 2-3 wire gauges heavier. For example, in the US building codes require 12 gauge wire for a typical run from a 20 amp breaker to a string of standard wall outlets. If you are using CCA, you have to use 10 gauge wire, which has about 1.8 time the cross sectional area of a 12 gauge wire. Aluminum is so much cheaper that it comes out ahead despite needing so much more material.
Utterly wrong. Very few US house get two legs of a three phase system. Post above has it right. The power poles running down my street have three wires at the top, 12 KV three phase. The transformer mounted just below those wires is a simple single phase transformer with two skinny wires at the top connected to the 12 KV, and three terminals on the side, that as stated above are a 240 V secondary with a center tap. Center tap is the neutral, and is literally grounded. A wire runs down the side of the pole and connects the center tap to a 10 foot long copper plated steel rod pounded into the ground beside the pole. Three wires come across the street to my house: the center tap (a bare wire) and the two outside taps of the single phase secondary. At my house, the center tap is connected to the bare metal buss bars inside the breaker panel that are in turn connected to the metal case of the breaker panel. Another heavy wire connects these neutral buss bars to my house's own ground rod - a 10 foot long rod driven into the soil beside the house. Inside the breaker panel the half the breakers are connected to one of the two hot wires, half to the other. The wires from the breaker box to an outlet in a room have three conductors:typically one black, one white, and one bare wire. Oddly both the bare wire and white wire connect to the exact same neutral buss bar in the breaker panel. Yes, that is right - they are redundant connections to the same place. At the wall outlet the black wire goes to one flat opening in a wall plug, the white wire goes to the other flat opening, and the bare (ground) wire goes to the circular connector. If you need a 240 volt connection for a high power load, a two pole breaker is used, and the wire to the outlet will have 4 wires: typically black and red (hot), white (neutral) and bare (ground). As with a 120 volt outlet, the white and bare wires are both connected to the same buss bar in the breaker box.
DC over long lines means no inductive and capacitive parasitic losses, and also reduces corona discharge (100,000 VAC has a peak voltage 141,000 volts) DC over long lines also means you need AC to DC conversion at the source, and DC to AC conversion at the other end. Expensive and awkward in Edison's time - much less difficult now. (It is still impossible to beat the reliability of a passive transformer for voltage conversion)
DC over long lines does NOT mean thick heavy cables or lots of loss, unless you stupidly try to distribute at low, end user voltages over long distances.
Um, no, that was not why the Rosetta stone was valuable. It was one lump of rock, "encoded" by chiseling symbols. It was not multiple forms of storage. It is more analogous to a single CD with the same song encoded as linear PCM, mp3 and OGG. So what made the Rosetta stone valuable was that it was the same content written with three coding systems -ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek script. It was only valuable because the Greef and Demotic were decodable, and by comparison scholars learned to read ancient Egyptian. That allowed other ancient Egyptian texts to be read, whereas previously that knowledge had been lost.
All the anti-vaxxers I know are liberal - because I live in the SF bay area, and almost everyone here, especially in my immediate vicinity, is pretty far left of center. Lot's of belief in my neck of the wood in various and sundry questionable "alternative medicine" practices. Lot's of distrust of both government and large corporations. Both of those earned that distrust, but now it has blinded many people I know to the perfectly good and useful things also done by companies and public agencies.
Used a mod point just because it is getting so rare to see technically knowledgeable comments around here. I wanted this to get noticed. AC is correct, silicon solar cells are at their best with wavelengths just a bit longer than visible. Same thing applies to LEDs. There are high power infrared LEDs that are better than 40% efficient at turning electrical energy into photons, and the last time I worked with them was over 20 years ago, so the state of the art may be even better now.
None of the drives I have here failed due to this bug. They are still visible to the BIOS, but the most common failure mode is that the drive spins up, and then the head repeatedly seeks - click whir, click whir etc. Tries many times then spins down. Others are kind of readable, but have SMART warning, and bad sectors. I will second the comment someone else made about Seagate sending back even more terrible "refurbs". Some of my customer's drives did fail under warranty, and in every case I can recall when I returned the failed drive, the "refurbished" unit they sent me back failed in under a year. I am somewhat at a loss when asked by my customers what they should get instead. If they can afford it, and/or don't need too much space, SSD's are probably somewhat less likely to fail. I won't know for sure for another 3-4 years. Other than that, I just hammer away at the need for a backup system that can do a bare metal restore....
Yes, I also have very old Seagate drives with capacities from about 40 to 300 or so gigabytes that work fine. I also have a 5 gallon pail full of dead 1 terabyte drives that are 2-4 years old. I do IT consulting (mostly for small business) and the failure rate on the 1 terabyte and up drives has been hideous. I have been hammering on all my customers to do full drive image backups regularly - and to replace the backup devices as soon as they are over two years old. I'm generally not a hard sell guy, but I am pushing this, because I don't want them to be able to say they weren't warned when I have to charge them $thousands to get going again after a drive fails.
Apps I use that perhaps aren't quite so common guitar tuner audio signal generator network scan and ping RDP and VNC client Apps kids at the autism spectrum school I volunteer at use: Text to speech for non-verbal kids Pictographs to speech for non-verbal/non-literate kids Both of the above types of kid have sometimes surprisingly able brains hidden by specific deficits in forming speech. Lots of educational programs that seem truly useful
I am typing this on an early 2008 17" Macbook pro. It has a Core 2 duo CPU. I recently added 2 gigs of RAM and cloned the 6 year old hard drive to an SSD. It was running just fine on OSX 10.7 (Lion) but it offered to update OSX and I said yes. OSX 10.10.1, (Yosemite) runs even better. Faster, less memory used by the OS, extremely stable. So my 6 1/2 year old Mac is still fully supported....
Wood frame single family houses built to most recent building codes are quite safe in an earthquake. Most of the house damage in the Marina district in the 1989 quake in the SF Bay area happened because: 1) The houses had large gaps in the lower story of a two or three story structure (for car garage.) This made the sheer strength low 2) These same house were built on filled in bay on water saturated fill that liquefied when shaken 3) They did not have foundation structure that went deep down through the soft fill to bedrock. Very few other wooden houses outside that specific area were damaged. My two story wood frame house, just 15 miles in a straight line from the epicenter of the quake did not even have any cracks in plaster or windows. Brick buildings on the other hand collapse to piles of rubble. In some parts of America brick is considered a superior or premium type of construction. In California wood framing is the most suitable and used even in the most expensive homes. Foundations are concrete, and how they are made depends on the geology of the land the house is on. Minimum on very stable compacted soil is steel rod reinforced concrete beam, shape like an upside down T, with the horizontal part of the T 18" wide and 10" thick, and the stem of the T is 10" wide and 18" tall. This is mostly buried, with about 6" of the stem sticking above ground. If the ground is less stable round holes about 12" in diameter are drilled down to bedrock. That might be 30 feet of more. Assemblies of steel rebar are lowered into the hole and then concrete is poured in. These piers are spaced about 10 feet apart around the perimeter of the house, and are connected together at the top by a steel reinforced concrete beam that is, as with the simple foundation, is about 10"x18" Chances are you know our stupid "English" measurement system, but for reference, 1 foot (12 inches) is about 30 cm. Wood frame is strongly bolted to the foundation beam, and the outside of the wood frame is sheathed in plywood sheer wall with strict rules about thickness of the plywood and spacing of nails that fasten the sheet to the vertical boards. In the lower stories of a multiple story building the size and spacing of any opening that interrupt the sheer wall are limited. If a big opening is need it has to be framed with substantial steel beams. Built to these standards, a wood frame building is MUCH safer in an earthquake than a brick building, and just as safe or safer than a building made of all reinforced concrete.
Water heaters don't heat pressurized water to above the boiling point - at least not unless the thermostat fails. And even if it does, the incoming water line rarely has a one way valve, so if the thermostat fails and the water starts to boil, the pressure can't go higher than the inlet pressure. If for some reason the steam produced by a failed thermostat can't push back out the inlet pipe to limit the pressure, there is an over pressure relief valve built into every water heater.
I'm more than a little surprised that mxtoolbox doesn't include hostkarma in the list of blacklists it checks The guy that runs hostkarma, and the junk email filtering service he offers, is very, very good. I regularly recommend junkemailfilter to my clients who have their own mail servers.
In the 1990's I worked in R&D at Dolby Laboratories. There were a number of PhDs there who were not just useful, but were in fact key contributors to the real world success of the company. They were mostly in the coder group, doing development of lossy audio codecs.
Substations are completely bi-directional. They are simply big 50 or 60 Hz transformers, and there is no reason they can't flow power in either directions. Only exception that comes to mind is a DC to AC conversion station (some long distance transmission is very high voltage DC.) But those are a tiny subset.
No, congressmen and Senators get paid while in office. If they lose after one term, they have only earned a tiny fraction of their pension, and have to wait until retirement age to collect even that. It takes many years in office to get a "full" pension, which is still less than their last salary.
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Tesla owner here: Your math is way off -
230V at 400 amps is 92KW. Charging is maybe 95% efficient.If your 85 KWH Tesla battery was near empty if would take about an hour to fill at that rate. Longer in realitity, as the charge rate decreases as you approach full. Tesla's supercharger stations supply a maximum of 120KW during the initial 15-30 minutes, then taper down to be nice to the battery.
The "hose" at the supercharger kiosk is similar to a gas station hose, and delivers about 360VDC at 330 amps
Supercharger locations have up to 10 spots, so the local utility has to provide a feed of 1.2 MW to such a location
That's a 30 amps per leg on a three phase circuit at 12.5 KV, 30 amp wiring is quite modest in diameter. In US units that's a 10 gauge wire (0.101 inches in diameter)
The way the law is now written, the only way for the feds to collect the fine/tax if you don't pay is to withhold it from your tax refund. They are specifically prohibited from trying to collect by garnishing your wages, sucking it out of your back account or any other method. There is no criminal penalty either. You can't be arrested for not buying insurance.If you are a subsistence farmer living off grid there is no way they can make you to buy the insurance, and no way to penalize you if you don't. And you can still show up at an emergency room and get treated.
The law is without a doubt designed to push folks towards buying - but "forced"? I don't think that is an accurate characterization
Well, actually, a Spark with an electric drivetrain is a Spark EV
http://www.chevrolet.com/spark...
Serious question: in the late 18th century did "arms" only mean "firearms"
Or does the second amendment protect my right to walk around wherever I want with a machete or a battle axe?
The only good answer I found on this thread. I'm married to a high level tax professional. She has decades of experience and works with the most complex returns for corporations and for high wealth individuals. She has researched and answered this question for several clients, and the answer is always the same - "it depends."
Depends on all the factors above, and more. And just as the concluding sentence by ShainghaiBill says, each case is treated individually and there is no absolute line that can be drawn.
Uber has enough money to argue this in a higher court, and I'm sure they will.
Looking beyond Uber, the general trend to turn all workers into contractors is more of a political than legal debate. We, as a society, need to decide how much to go the Libertarian route vs a more regulated route.
Uber vs California Labor Commission is just one skirmish in a much bigger battle.
Personally I think we need the kind of worker protections the California Labor Commission is saying apply to Uber drivers - and I AM an independent contractor, sole proprietor.
I attended UC Irvine in the early 1970's. Tuition was $618/year. Inflation adjust about 9:1, and tuition was about $5600/yr in 2015 money.
My son graduated from Cal Poly SLO last year. Tuition was about $8500/yr. So his schooling was definitely more expensive than mine, but not absurdly so.
I'm an IT consultant (AKA Computer Guy) with quite a few "trade" companies as my customers. Auto repair shops, body shops, plumbers, electricians, painters, plumbers, roofers etc. In my area (Marin County CA) they are all hurting for qualified workers. Jobs here for taking for anyone who knows their trade. They will have to commute an hour to work if they want semi-affordable housing, but the jobs are available.
Lean quickly and retain what matters (to you). That sounds like a good working definition of smarter than many others ...
You need investing advice more than career advice. After 10 years of work you should have much more than a three month cushion -
It sound like you have fallen into the trap of allowing your expenses to grow to consume all current income. That is going to be hard to reverse, and THAT is what you need some professional help with,
At 60 Hz skin effect is essentially nonexistent. There is no physical reason why AC at that frequency would work better (or worse) with a copper clad aluminum conductor. At 60 Hz the whole conductor is used by the AC - there will be just as much current flowing down the center as down the skin. The only reason the aluminum wire is clad with copper is that aluminum oxide is a very good insulator, and bare aluminum gets an oxide coating within minutes in our oxygen rich world.
Copper oxide is a pretty good conductor, and does not (in the thin layer that occurs) impede connections. Bare aluminum wire was made infamous for causing fires in homes, when connections became high resistance (where the wire connected to a switch or outlet). I don't believe bare aluminum is allowed by most building codes anymore. CCA has replaced it..
BTW - the only reason to use aluminum at all is cost. Aluminum is much cheaper than copper. Also much inferior as a conductor, with about twice the resistance. The cladding on CCA is not thick enough to significantly offset this deficit, so for a given amperage, copper clad aluminum has to be 2-3 wire gauges heavier. For example, in the US building codes require 12 gauge wire for a typical run from a 20 amp breaker to a string of standard wall outlets. If you are using CCA, you have to use 10 gauge wire, which has about 1.8 time the cross sectional area of a 12 gauge wire. Aluminum is so much cheaper that it comes out ahead despite needing so much more material.
Utterly wrong. Very few US house get two legs of a three phase system. Post above has it right. The power poles running down my street have three wires at the top, 12 KV three phase. The transformer mounted just below those wires is a simple single phase transformer with two skinny wires at the top connected to the 12 KV, and three terminals on the side, that as stated above are a 240 V secondary with a center tap. Center tap is the neutral, and is literally grounded. A wire runs down the side of the pole and connects the center tap to a 10 foot long copper plated steel rod pounded into the ground beside the pole. Three wires come across the street to my house: the center tap (a bare wire) and the two outside taps of the single phase secondary.
At my house, the center tap is connected to the bare metal buss bars inside the breaker panel that are in turn connected to the metal case of the breaker panel. Another heavy wire connects these neutral buss bars to my house's own ground rod - a 10 foot long rod driven into the soil beside the house. Inside the breaker panel the half the breakers are connected to one of the two hot wires, half to the other. The wires from the breaker box to an outlet in a room have three conductors:typically one black, one white, and one bare wire. Oddly both the bare wire and white wire connect to the exact same neutral buss bar in the breaker panel. Yes, that is right - they are redundant connections to the same place. At the wall outlet the black wire goes to one flat opening in a wall plug, the white wire goes to the other flat opening, and the bare (ground) wire goes to the circular connector. If you need a 240 volt connection for a high power load, a two pole breaker is used, and the wire to the outlet will have 4 wires: typically black and red (hot), white (neutral) and bare (ground). As with a 120 volt outlet, the white and bare wires are both connected to the same buss bar in the breaker box.
DC over long lines means no inductive and capacitive parasitic losses, and also reduces corona discharge (100,000 VAC has a peak voltage 141,000 volts)
DC over long lines also means you need AC to DC conversion at the source, and DC to AC conversion at the other end. Expensive and awkward in Edison's time - much less difficult now. (It is still impossible to beat the reliability of a passive transformer for voltage conversion)
DC over long lines does NOT mean thick heavy cables or lots of loss, unless you stupidly try to distribute at low, end user voltages over long distances.
Um, no, that was not why the Rosetta stone was valuable. It was one lump of rock, "encoded" by chiseling symbols. It was not multiple forms of storage. It is more analogous to a single CD with the same song encoded as linear PCM, mp3 and OGG. So what made the Rosetta stone valuable was that it was the same content written with three coding systems -ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek script. It was only valuable because the Greef and Demotic were decodable, and by comparison scholars learned to read ancient Egyptian. That allowed other ancient Egyptian texts to be read, whereas previously that knowledge had been lost.
All the anti-vaxxers I know are liberal - because I live in the SF bay area, and almost everyone here, especially in my immediate vicinity, is pretty far left of center. Lot's of belief in my neck of the wood in various and sundry questionable "alternative medicine" practices. Lot's of distrust of both government and large corporations. Both of those earned that distrust, but now it has blinded many people I know to the perfectly good and useful things also done by companies and public agencies.
Used a mod point just because it is getting so rare to see technically knowledgeable comments around here. I wanted this to get noticed. AC is correct, silicon solar cells are at their best with wavelengths just a bit longer than visible. Same thing applies to LEDs. There are high power infrared LEDs that are better than 40% efficient at turning electrical energy into photons, and the last time I worked with them was over 20 years ago, so the state of the art may be even better now.
None of the drives I have here failed due to this bug. They are still visible to the BIOS, but the most common failure mode is that the drive spins up, and then the head repeatedly seeks - click whir, click whir etc. Tries many times then spins down. Others are kind of readable, but have SMART warning, and bad sectors. I will second the comment someone else made about Seagate sending back even more terrible "refurbs". Some of my customer's drives did fail under warranty, and in every case I can recall when I returned the failed drive, the "refurbished" unit they sent me back failed in under a year. ....
I am somewhat at a loss when asked by my customers what they should get instead. If they can afford it, and/or don't need too much space, SSD's are probably somewhat less likely to fail. I won't know for sure for another 3-4 years. Other than that, I just hammer away at the need for a backup system that can do a bare metal restore
Yes, I also have very old Seagate drives with capacities from about 40 to 300 or so gigabytes that work fine. I also have a 5 gallon pail full of dead 1 terabyte drives that are 2-4 years old. I do IT consulting (mostly for small business) and the failure rate on the 1 terabyte and up drives has been hideous. I have been hammering on all my customers to do full drive image backups regularly - and to replace the backup devices as soon as they are over two years old. I'm generally not a hard sell guy, but I am pushing this, because I don't want them to be able to say they weren't warned when I have to charge them $thousands to get going again after a drive fails.
Apps I use that perhaps aren't quite so common
guitar tuner
audio signal generator
network scan and ping
RDP and VNC client
Apps kids at the autism spectrum school I volunteer at use:
Text to speech for non-verbal kids
Pictographs to speech for non-verbal/non-literate kids
Both of the above types of kid have sometimes surprisingly able brains hidden by specific deficits in forming speech.
Lots of educational programs that seem truly useful
I am typing this on an early 2008 17" Macbook pro. It has a Core 2 duo CPU. I recently added 2 gigs of RAM and cloned the 6 year old hard drive to an SSD. It was running just fine on OSX 10.7 (Lion) but it offered to update OSX and I said yes. OSX 10.10.1, (Yosemite) runs even better. Faster, less memory used by the OS, extremely stable. So my 6 1/2 year old Mac is still fully supported ....
Wood frame single family houses built to most recent building codes are quite safe in an earthquake. Most of the house damage in the Marina district in the 1989 quake in the SF Bay area happened because:
1) The houses had large gaps in the lower story of a two or three story structure (for car garage.) This made the sheer strength low
2) These same house were built on filled in bay on water saturated fill that liquefied when shaken
3) They did not have foundation structure that went deep down through the soft fill to bedrock.
Very few other wooden houses outside that specific area were damaged. My two story wood frame house, just 15 miles in a straight line from the epicenter of the quake did not even have any cracks in plaster or windows.
Brick buildings on the other hand collapse to piles of rubble.
In some parts of America brick is considered a superior or premium type of construction. In California wood framing is the most suitable and used even in the most expensive homes.
Foundations are concrete, and how they are made depends on the geology of the land the house is on. Minimum on very stable compacted soil is steel rod reinforced concrete beam, shape like an upside down T, with the horizontal part of the T 18" wide and 10" thick, and the stem of the T is 10" wide and 18" tall. This is mostly buried, with about 6" of the stem sticking above ground. If the ground is less stable round holes about 12" in diameter are drilled down to bedrock. That might be 30 feet of more. Assemblies of steel rebar are lowered into the hole and then concrete is poured in. These piers are spaced about 10 feet apart around the perimeter of the house, and are connected together at the top by a steel reinforced concrete beam that is, as with the simple foundation, is about 10"x18" Chances are you know our stupid "English" measurement system, but for reference, 1 foot (12 inches) is about 30 cm.
Wood frame is strongly bolted to the foundation beam, and the outside of the wood frame is sheathed in plywood sheer wall with strict rules about thickness of the plywood and spacing of nails that fasten the sheet to the vertical boards. In the lower stories of a multiple story building the size and spacing of any opening that interrupt the sheer wall are limited. If a big opening is need it has to be framed with substantial steel beams.
Built to these standards, a wood frame building is MUCH safer in an earthquake than a brick building, and just as safe or safer than a building made of all reinforced concrete.
Water heaters don't heat pressurized water to above the boiling point - at least not unless the thermostat fails. And even if it does, the incoming water line rarely has a one way valve, so if the thermostat fails and the water starts to boil, the pressure can't go higher than the inlet pressure. If for some reason the steam produced by a failed thermostat can't push back out the inlet pipe to limit the pressure, there is an over pressure relief valve built into every water heater.
I'm more than a little surprised that mxtoolbox doesn't include hostkarma in the list of blacklists it checks
The guy that runs hostkarma, and the junk email filtering service he offers, is very, very good. I regularly recommend junkemailfilter to my clients who have their own mail servers.
In the 1990's I worked in R&D at Dolby Laboratories. There were a number of PhDs there who were not just useful, but were in fact key contributors to the real world success of the company. They were mostly in the coder group, doing development of lossy audio codecs.
Substations are completely bi-directional. They are simply big 50 or 60 Hz transformers, and there is no reason they can't flow power in either directions. Only exception that comes to mind is a DC to AC conversion station (some long distance transmission is very high voltage DC.)
But those are a tiny subset.
No, congressmen and Senators get paid while in office. If they lose after one term, they have only earned a tiny fraction of their pension, and have to wait until retirement age to collect even that. It takes many years in office to get a "full" pension, which is still less than their last salary.