Tesla Syndrome

How do you capture the carbon released?

Do you mean by the coal-fired power plants that recharge Tesla's?

We feed it to our plants.

My 1984 Volvo 240DL had the simplest system to select the heat/cool air flow. 3 buttons - one for windshield, one for middle and one for floor. You could select any or all of up to 7 varieties without rotating a dial and guessing...and again without taking eyes off the road.

Every car I've driven since then hasn't had these simple and obvious choices.

Not exactly an engineering improvement.

John ;-#(#

The difference is hidden states.

Same answer. The temperature setting is absolute on angular position, which the driver soon learns. There is no guessing involved.

We demo'd an HP oscilloscope that had 4 buttons to do everything. We couldn't get it to work and the HP sales person couldn't either. Good scopes still have knobs.

On Monday, 21 August 2023 at 23:46:38 UTC-7, Don Y wrote: ...

My Prius has that feature.

A physical button selects either HVAC for all occupants or just the driver.

kw

Tesla has that. It also allows control of air for the back seat from the driver's console.

I was happy for 20 years with the simple, manual controls in my pickup. One knob selected the air flow direction (which isn't all that hard to learn to use without looking). One knob selected the temperature (mix of warm/cold air). One knob controlled the fan speed. Worked great, and was very simple. No need to take your eyes off the road.

The ones I don't get have a temperature setting. What temperature is it controlling? Most likely a temperature somewhere in the dash that I don't care about. I mostly ignore that since it seems to accomplish nothing useful.

I'd like to know what it's doing sometimes. When the outside are is 72°F and the cooling is set for 73°F, I wonder if the AC runs at all???

I had my first glimpse at nonsensical tech in highschool. The richer kids had Philips and later Sony portable cassette players. They'd run around campus like zombies, sunken into their tunes. If you wanted to talk to one you had to tap their shoulders and they had to strip back the headphones. Then ... TADAAAH ... a "Talk-Through" button was added. Suddenly kids could communicate again using their mouths. What a concept!

From a marketing perspective this was brilliant though. First you take a resource given by nature away. Then, for a nice chunk of money, you offer to put it back. Ka-ching. Of course, now the act of listening would also begin to consume batteries ... double ka-ching.

Touché!

Even better, use it to carbonate beer. So if we'd all drink a lot more beer we can save the universe :-)

"You don't buy beer, you rent it."

A car I had to hire a few days ago had the A/C control on a touch screen. Just as well I had a passenger, because there's no way I could safely have adjusted it while driving.

On another note about inappropriately designed technology, I was using on-line check-in for a flight (what does it even mean to check-in online?). They said they'd send the boarding pass to my phone. But what they emailed was a link to a page that could be retrieved to show the boarding pass. So it wasn't on the phone.

I don't have broadband access on my phone - I have almost no need for such a thing, and see no reason to pay for it. At check-in time, the airport's free WiFi was down. So I had no access to the boarding pass.

A work-around was found, but I can imagine chaos ensuing if a major mobile phone telco's network went down, and a large proportion of passengers could not access their boarding passes. And it seems completely unnecessary. All they needed to do was embed the boarding pass in the email.

I've pointed this out on their Facebook page. I'm sure they'll do nothing about it.

Sylvia.

I have no idea what you mean by "broadband access". Most airports have Wifi, but if that's down, you still have one way to get a boarding pass. Go to the kiosk the airlines have specifically to get boarding passes.

I'm not a fan of the phone boarding pass. With Spirit you use their app, and it downloads to the phone. No email is involved. You do need Internet connectivity, but you can do it from home before you leave. What I don't like about it, is that when I bring up the app and show the boarding pass, I only have so much time before it times out and goes away, and I have to bring up the app again. Silly feature.

Or, you can get a paper boarding pass when the electronic one fails.

Their "facebook page"??? No, that's never going to get any attention.

It's not like airlines listen to their millions of customers. They don't have time for that.

Yes, there are solutions, but if a large number of passengers suddenly need something that most never need, it's unlikely that the airline will be able to cope without creating significant delays. Sometimes that is unavoidable, but in this case it could easily be avoided.

It's more about there existing a public record of that fact that they've been averted to the problem. If and when it hits the fan, they cannot claim it was an issue that was never foreseen.

Sylvia

I hate to break it to you, but the ticket kiosks are seldom stressed and the phone boarding passes are not used that frequently... at least not at Spirit.

LOL! If you think a Facebook post is "official notice" of anything, you need to rethink that.

Also, shit will never hit the fan on this issue. There is no shit and there is no fan. Airlines get away with murder anyway.

Perhaps not where you live. On the flight in question, almost everyone was using a phone boarding pass. The problem would be compounded if people expected to do so, only to discover the moment before that it wasn't going to work.

Sylvia.

All the modern inconveniences!

That's not the issue. You have to look at a touch screen to use it.

Funny how I thought of that before the flight out, but my printer was too heavy to take with me on the trip to print out the one for the flight back.

Sylvia.

That would have to be a week-long online training course, with road test.

My Audi has all incrmental pushbutton controls, little black-on-black pushbuttons. I've never learned how to set things without looking away from the road.

It's good that the gas and brake pedals are pretty much standardized. The transmission and parking brake aren't.

The Digikey and Mouser sites are useful multi-vendor search engines, with pricing too. They could be much better, especially Mouser's.

The D and M searches at least lead one to a manufacturer. I've discovered manufacturers that I didn't know existed, or found that Littlefuse now makes mosfets.

Mouser is crazy. Ask a simple question and it complains about too many parameters, or ignores a selection, or finds nothing.