Glass never had a chance, not because of the privacy issues but because it just didn't actually have the processing power or battery life to do anything useful. Considering the guy who designed it has worn wearable computers for more than a decade, I expected better.
I'm sure somebody could recommend a normal-size UPS with uptime much greater than an hour (even when running this as a server, plus your router, plus your cable/dsl modem), which seems better to me.
hmmm, hadn't considered used nozzles. I was sort of lured in to the +35HP aspect of the new, bigger ones. But maybe not worth the bucks.
Oh, you can get used, bigger ones too. Mine are Bosch.216s sourced from somebody who upgraded to even bigger ones.
By the way, if you want more power, get a tune too. (And then if you really want to go crazy, whenever you eventually replace your turbo, use it as an excuse to upgrade!)
I'm using Android TorquePro to monitor temps. I see it also has a boost gauge, not sure how accurate that is. Will do more research, esp. if it is related to the oil usage.
I like my Scangauge because I can leave it in the car instead of having to re-sync the bluetooth OBD device to my phone every time.
Just in case the oil usage actually is from the seals on your turbo starting to go, make sure you know how to deal with an engine runaway without breaking your car. (Leaving the car in gear and without using the clutch, apply the brake until the car stops and the engine stalls. Then do not attempt to re-start -- have the car towed to whoever is going to fix it. An engine runaway would leave substantial amounts of incompressible oil in the cylinders; re-starting would cause bent connecting rods.)
My point on oil changes was more about the $10(?) filters, compared to maybe $5 for a gas engine. I only paid $16 for my last jug of T6, really not much different than the synthetic Mobil 1 I normally use for gas engine oil changes. (actually, just checked, filter is $6 online, so I'm off base on this point. mis-remembering)
Buy Mann, Mahle or similar from somewhere like idparts.com or boraparts.com in bulk when they go on sale.
As an addition to my original point, the shop says I need 3 new glow plugs and wanted $215 for that work. Just shopping online for the parts, seems like DIY is going to be $50 at least for parts. (I have the manual, it has 4 glow plugs on the engine, and three more in the coolant - need to do more research about the coolant ones) Some of the DIY glow plug articles suggest replacing glow plugs every 4 years, just because. No way is that going to contribute to low maintenance on diesels:-)
First, you only need glow plugs for starting in cold weather (say, less than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe?). If they fail in the summer, you might not even notice or care for a few months (aside from the dashboard light). Second, are you sure the "three in the coolant" actually exist? I've never heard of such a thing.
Next, some noob is going to ask what "ESR," "hairy" and "jargon file" are. And then somebody else won't know what "noob" means. It's the Eternal September all over again (said the guy with the six-digit ID to the guy with the four-digit one)...
I chose examples that exclude legislation as the reason lightweight cars aren't built any more.
How so? Lotuses and Smarts and whatnot still have to meet safety standards. In fact, a US-spec Smart Fortwo has eight airbags! (That also helps explain why it weighs almost 500 lbs more than the Honda CRX I keep comparing it to.)
In Europe, there's an entire class of cars smaller than the Mirage and Fiesta. The VW Up (47 mpg), Suzuki Alto (54 mpg), Toyota Aygo (56 mpg) to name a few (and that's real-world fuel consumption, not a theoretical rating).
Oh, don't get me wrong: we have a few tiny cars too, including a Toyota even smaller than the Aygo (the Scion iQ). But even it only gets 37 MPG.
Part of the problem in this discussion is that your UK gallons are larger, which makes the European cars seem better than they actually are -- or makes the US ones seem worse than they actually are, depending on your point of view.
The sad thing is that "minicars" like the iQ and the Smart actually lose in efficiency to subcompacts (either outright in the case of Fortwo vs. Mirage, or at least after considering utility -- a usable back seat is worth losing a MPG or two in almost every case.) A minicar needs to come out way ahead -- by at least 5 MPG, I'd say -- to actually win (a feat which the old cars accomplished). There is, after all, a reason why Geo Metro XFIs are so popular on ecomodder.com, even though they're 20+ years old.
This site has RW usage of the Metro at closer to 40 than 47.
All the numbers I've been quoting are the official EPA numbers from fueleconomy.gov. The "real world" numbers must be assumed to be bullshit because there's no controlling for sample size or bias. (For example: the "real world" MPG for the 2014 Mitsubishi Mirage is 46.8 while for the 2015 it's 33.0, even though they're exactly the same damn car!) If you want to compare "real world" MPG, you're probably better off using fuelly.com, but even then hypermilers skew the data.
If, when you die, that's it... you are done and over with, and none of the choices you would have made will actually have any bearing on you, then you can do whatever you want, live your life as irresponsibly as you want, in full assurance that death will enable you to escape whatever consequence might otherwise befall you.
If you need fear of damnation to stop you from doing evil things, then you are a sociopath.
Research data really ought to just get published with the paper. Then (A) it's easier to peer-review / reproduce / verify the research, and (B) storing it becomes somebody else's problem. As Linus said, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it;)"
Because if the number of times you need something times the time it takes for you to search for it is less than the time it takes to organize it carefully, then it's not worth organizing.
Part of my "filing" system is literally a pile of papers in a box, stacked in roughly-chronological order. Insertion is O(1); retrieval is O(n) (maybe faster if I know how old the thing I'm looking for is). I insert much more often than I retrieve, so it works just fine.
The reason almost nobody builds cars like that anymore is almost nobody buys cars like that anymore.
On the contrary: the reason almost nobody buys cars like that anymore is that almost nobody builds cars like that anymore.
Lightweight cars are still possible. Lotus and Smart for example. VW XL1. Austere cars are still available too (in Europe at least, IDK about the States) (a recent Citroen, Dacia).
For your examples of "lightweight" cars, you listed an expensive sports car (that isn't sold in the US anymore), a car that gets piss-poor economy relative to its size (in America, the shitty gasoline-only Smart gets only 36 mpg -- in comparison, even a gasoline midsize sedan (Mazda6) gets 32), and a concept car that doesn't actually exist as a product. Then, for "austere" cars you mentioned things that are indeed not available in America. Forgive me if I am not persuaded.
(Actually, there are a few halfway-decent small and cheap new cars: the Mitsubishi Mirage and the Ford Fiesta... but even then, they only manage 40 and 36 mpg respectively, and only get even that much because they have 3-cylinder engines. In comparison, the 1989 Honda CRX HF got 44 MPG (on the same scale) with a 4-cylinder engine and the 1991 Geo Metro XFI got 47 mpg with a 3-cylinder engine... look how far we've fallen!)
Having 240V (presumably mains AC current) on a switch is insane and extremely dangerous.
Am I missing something? Isn't there a 240V switch in just about everybody's house (e.g., the circuit breaker for something like a dryer, AC or electric oven)?
I can only guess that the walls were radioactive and they "solved" the problem by encapsulating them with paint. Ironically, it'd probably be the one place where using lead-based paint would be a good thing...
(Actually, I bet they used lead-based bright orange paint to encapsulate the radioactive stuff, then non-lead white paint to encapsulate the lead!)
Go to a TDI Club GTG; folks there might help you clean your intake manifold for free if you ask nicely. Also, you don't need injectors, just nozzles, and people who are upgrading sell used ones cheap.
Get yourself either some mechanical gauges or at least something like a ScanGauge; you need to be able to monitor temperature (as you found out) but you should also monitor turbo boost -- especially since yours is probably on its way out, considering that oil consumption.
Oil changes should not be much more expensive than on gasoline cars; Shell Rotella T6 (which is what I use in my ALH with no problem) is only ~$25/gallon and the oil change interval is at least twice as long as it is for cars that don't use synthetic. (I use a 10K-mile OCI, even when running B100.)
Now granted, I'm not going to claim that my '98 Beetle costs less to maintain than my '96 Ford Ranger (let alone cheaper than something like a Toyota or Hyundai), but it's not that expensive either.
2 weeks of vacation pay is mandatory, and the typical minimum wage job allows you to receive that as compensation rather than taking the time off, effectively making the year contain 54 pay weeks. $11 * 40 * 54 / 12 = $1980.
So in Canada, the "typical" minimum-wage job is full-time?
If we assume a reasonable 15% of wages is dedicated to buying a vehicle
This is not a reasonable assumption. 15% of the budget "might" be reasonable for total transportation costs (vehicle purchase + insurance + fuel + maintenance), but not vehicle purchase price alone. (Also, I say "might" because the mainstream idea of "reasonable" is not -- people should be saving/investing a much larger percentage of their income than they do, to the tune of 50%.)
However, did the article correct for sales LEVELs?
The article used the median household income; I couldn't find specific mention, but I can only assume it also used the median new car sales price because to do otherwise would have been moronic.
And Canada's economy typically does mirror that of the US (usually lags behind a year or two)
Getting 200-300k miles on a diesel engine with no maintenance is common.
I'm as big a fan of TDIs as anyone, but I think you're overselling it a bit. You really mean "with only regular maintenance." Otherwise, that no-maintenance TDI is going to fail at about 20k or so due to lack of oil changes, or at least at around 80k or so when the timing belt snaps.
Isn't that to be expected? If the average car is a used car, then the market will move to cover that average with the average household income.
While that makes sense, the claim of the article is that car prices are rising relative to household income -- in other words, it implies that the average new car used to be affordable, that it now is no longer so, and that it's continuing to become increasingly unaffordable.
Also, when you demand only the absolute top end fuel economy and space-age safety features, yeah, your car is going to be expensive. Especially when you use legislation to require both of those, since it means zero competition encouraging the higher end models to come back down to earth with more regular pricing.
This, I can agree with. There's no legitimate reason why cheap, lightweight cars like the Honda CRX (better fuel economy than a modern Prius... in 1988!) are effectively no longer allowed to be made. (And before somebody tries to use something like an Elio as a counterexample... it's not. It's a damn motorcycle.)
But please tell me how the average person can't afford a $200 a month car payment with minimum wage set at $1980 a month.
That's a strawman argument: the average household can indeed afford a $200 per month car payment, but that $200 per month is only enough to get you a cheap, lower-than-average car! The article never made any claim that the average household couldn't afford a car at all; only that it couldn't afford an average one.
It's also a strawman for a different reason: the minimum wage is not $1980 per month! First of all, $1980 / 160 hours (full time for a month) = $12.375 per hour, which is simply wrong. Federal minimum wage is actually $7.25 per hour, which would add up to $1160 per month. Second, federal minimum wage is per hour, not per month, and most minimum-wage workers aren't allowed by their employers to work a full 160 hours per month even if they want to, so the minimum "monthly" wage is even less than that.
You must have some weird, non-standard definition of "first." The EFF has had lots of petitions for lots of things for years now. The petition in question was just the first one since releasing the app.
In my case, last year there was a renter on my street who parked a boat on the street (on a trailer). It was oversized and really caused a problem trying to drive on the street. This was NOT a friendly neighbor, we tried knocking on the door, only to get rude looks and a "we can park it where we want" reply.
So, the HOA got involved, who were also ignored... until they got the police dept to come out and knock on the door... that got it it moved...:)
Police don't enforce HOA rules; they only enforce judgements levied by a court after somebody loses a civil lawsuit for violating HOA rules. The fact that the police solved the problem without the HOA having to win a lawsuit first strongly suggests that parking the boat on the street like that was actually a violation of the law, not a mere HOA rule.
In other words, the HOA's involvement was irrelevant because any random neighbor could have called the police himself.
No, it's not. It's just a random non-profit corporation that happens to have the words "Home Owner's Association" in its name and decides to concern itself with issues in a particular geographic location.
Similarly, I live in a neighborhood built between 1890 and 1950, before the concept of HOAs existed. We do have a 501(c)3 non-profit, voluntary-membership "community association" (founded in the '80s, I think), but it has no HOA-like legal authority.
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Glass never had a chance, not because of the privacy issues but because it just didn't actually have the processing power or battery life to do anything useful. Considering the guy who designed it has worn wearable computers for more than a decade, I expected better.
I'm sure somebody could recommend a normal-size UPS with uptime much greater than an hour (even when running this as a server, plus your router, plus your cable/dsl modem), which seems better to me.
Oh, you can get used, bigger ones too. Mine are Bosch .216s sourced from somebody who upgraded to even bigger ones.
By the way, if you want more power, get a tune too. (And then if you really want to go crazy, whenever you eventually replace your turbo, use it as an excuse to upgrade!)
I like my Scangauge because I can leave it in the car instead of having to re-sync the bluetooth OBD device to my phone every time.
Just in case the oil usage actually is from the seals on your turbo starting to go, make sure you know how to deal with an engine runaway without breaking your car. (Leaving the car in gear and without using the clutch, apply the brake until the car stops and the engine stalls. Then do not attempt to re-start -- have the car towed to whoever is going to fix it. An engine runaway would leave substantial amounts of incompressible oil in the cylinders; re-starting would cause bent connecting rods.)
Buy Mann, Mahle or similar from somewhere like idparts.com or boraparts.com in bulk when they go on sale.
First, you only need glow plugs for starting in cold weather (say, less than 45 degrees Fahrenheit, maybe?). If they fail in the summer, you might not even notice or care for a few months (aside from the dashboard light). Second, are you sure the "three in the coolant" actually exist? I've never heard of such a thing.
Next, some noob is going to ask what "ESR," "hairy" and "jargon file" are. And then somebody else won't know what "noob" means. It's the Eternal September all over again (said the guy with the six-digit ID to the guy with the four-digit one)...
I'm not sure if your spelling-fu is weak, or if you just don't know what the etymology of "[concept]-fu" is.
"Obviously, if it were important then somebody would be willing to spend money on it!" -- Republicans
("'Tragedy of the Commons?' What's that?" -- also Republicans)
How so? Lotuses and Smarts and whatnot still have to meet safety standards. In fact, a US-spec Smart Fortwo has eight airbags! (That also helps explain why it weighs almost 500 lbs more than the Honda CRX I keep comparing it to.)
Oh, don't get me wrong: we have a few tiny cars too, including a Toyota even smaller than the Aygo (the Scion iQ). But even it only gets 37 MPG.
Part of the problem in this discussion is that your UK gallons are larger, which makes the European cars seem better than they actually are -- or makes the US ones seem worse than they actually are, depending on your point of view.
The sad thing is that "minicars" like the iQ and the Smart actually lose in efficiency to subcompacts (either outright in the case of Fortwo vs. Mirage, or at least after considering utility -- a usable back seat is worth losing a MPG or two in almost every case.) A minicar needs to come out way ahead -- by at least 5 MPG, I'd say -- to actually win (a feat which the old cars accomplished). There is, after all, a reason why Geo Metro XFIs are so popular on ecomodder.com, even though they're 20+ years old.
All the numbers I've been quoting are the official EPA numbers from fueleconomy.gov. The "real world" numbers must be assumed to be bullshit because there's no controlling for sample size or bias. (For example: the "real world" MPG for the 2014 Mitsubishi Mirage is 46.8 while for the 2015 it's 33.0, even though they're exactly the same damn car!) If you want to compare "real world" MPG, you're probably better off using fuelly.com, but even then hypermilers skew the data.
If you need fear of damnation to stop you from doing evil things, then you are a sociopath.
Research data really ought to just get published with the paper. Then (A) it's easier to peer-review / reproduce / verify the research, and (B) storing it becomes somebody else's problem. As Linus said, "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"
Because if the number of times you need something times the time it takes for you to search for it is less than the time it takes to organize it carefully, then it's not worth organizing.
Part of my "filing" system is literally a pile of papers in a box, stacked in roughly-chronological order. Insertion is O(1); retrieval is O(n) (maybe faster if I know how old the thing I'm looking for is). I insert much more often than I retrieve, so it works just fine.
On the contrary: the reason almost nobody buys cars like that anymore is that almost nobody builds cars like that anymore.
For your examples of "lightweight" cars, you listed an expensive sports car (that isn't sold in the US anymore), a car that gets piss-poor economy relative to its size (in America, the shitty gasoline-only Smart gets only 36 mpg -- in comparison, even a gasoline midsize sedan (Mazda6) gets 32), and a concept car that doesn't actually exist as a product. Then, for "austere" cars you mentioned things that are indeed not available in America. Forgive me if I am not persuaded.
(Actually, there are a few halfway-decent small and cheap new cars: the Mitsubishi Mirage and the Ford Fiesta... but even then, they only manage 40 and 36 mpg respectively, and only get even that much because they have 3-cylinder engines. In comparison, the 1989 Honda CRX HF got 44 MPG (on the same scale) with a 4-cylinder engine and the 1991 Geo Metro XFI got 47 mpg with a 3-cylinder engine... look how far we've fallen!)
I know it's a stupid argument. That's why I was refuting it, not making it.
Am I missing something? Isn't there a 240V switch in just about everybody's house (e.g., the circuit breaker for something like a dryer, AC or electric oven)?
I can only guess that the walls were radioactive and they "solved" the problem by encapsulating them with paint. Ironically, it'd probably be the one place where using lead-based paint would be a good thing...
(Actually, I bet they used lead-based bright orange paint to encapsulate the radioactive stuff, then non-lead white paint to encapsulate the lead!)
Go to a TDI Club GTG; folks there might help you clean your intake manifold for free if you ask nicely. Also, you don't need injectors, just nozzles, and people who are upgrading sell used ones cheap.
Get yourself either some mechanical gauges or at least something like a ScanGauge; you need to be able to monitor temperature (as you found out) but you should also monitor turbo boost -- especially since yours is probably on its way out, considering that oil consumption.
Oil changes should not be much more expensive than on gasoline cars; Shell Rotella T6 (which is what I use in my ALH with no problem) is only ~$25/gallon and the oil change interval is at least twice as long as it is for cars that don't use synthetic. (I use a 10K-mile OCI, even when running B100.)
Now granted, I'm not going to claim that my '98 Beetle costs less to maintain than my '96 Ford Ranger (let alone cheaper than something like a Toyota or Hyundai), but it's not that expensive either.
So in Canada, the "typical" minimum-wage job is full-time?
This is not a reasonable assumption. 15% of the budget "might" be reasonable for total transportation costs (vehicle purchase + insurance + fuel + maintenance), but not vehicle purchase price alone. (Also, I say "might" because the mainstream idea of "reasonable" is not -- people should be saving/investing a much larger percentage of their income than they do, to the tune of 50%.)
The article used the median household income; I couldn't find specific mention, but I can only assume it also used the median new car sales price because to do otherwise would have been moronic.
Has your housing bubble burst yet?
I'm as big a fan of TDIs as anyone, but I think you're overselling it a bit. You really mean "with only regular maintenance." Otherwise, that no-maintenance TDI is going to fail at about 20k or so due to lack of oil changes, or at least at around 80k or so when the timing belt snaps.
While that makes sense, the claim of the article is that car prices are rising relative to household income -- in other words, it implies that the average new car used to be affordable, that it now is no longer so, and that it's continuing to become increasingly unaffordable.
This, I can agree with. There's no legitimate reason why cheap, lightweight cars like the Honda CRX (better fuel economy than a modern Prius... in 1988!) are effectively no longer allowed to be made. (And before somebody tries to use something like an Elio as a counterexample... it's not. It's a damn motorcycle.)
That's a strawman argument: the average household can indeed afford a $200 per month car payment, but that $200 per month is only enough to get you a cheap, lower-than-average car! The article never made any claim that the average household couldn't afford a car at all; only that it couldn't afford an average one.
It's also a strawman for a different reason: the minimum wage is not $1980 per month! First of all, $1980 / 160 hours (full time for a month) = $12.375 per hour, which is simply wrong. Federal minimum wage is actually $7.25 per hour, which would add up to $1160 per month. Second, federal minimum wage is per hour, not per month, and most minimum-wage workers aren't allowed by their employers to work a full 160 hours per month even if they want to, so the minimum "monthly" wage is even less than that.
Just for reference, the average-priced car is unaffordable by the average-income household.
Sorry, but nobody's well known for their lacrosse team.
Hey, speak for yourself! I wrote a secure "hello world" once....
You must have some weird, non-standard definition of "first." The EFF has had lots of petitions for lots of things for years now. The petition in question was just the first one since releasing the app.
It's not even a real police box. It's really a glorified blue gazebo.
Police don't enforce HOA rules; they only enforce judgements levied by a court after somebody loses a civil lawsuit for violating HOA rules. The fact that the police solved the problem without the HOA having to win a lawsuit first strongly suggests that parking the boat on the street like that was actually a violation of the law, not a mere HOA rule.
In other words, the HOA's involvement was irrelevant because any random neighbor could have called the police himself.
No, it's not. It's just a random non-profit corporation that happens to have the words "Home Owner's Association" in its name and decides to concern itself with issues in a particular geographic location.
Similarly, I live in a neighborhood built between 1890 and 1950, before the concept of HOAs existed. We do have a 501(c)3 non-profit, voluntary-membership "community association" (founded in the '80s, I think), but it has no HOA-like legal authority.