lol-lol

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/factors-safety-fos-d_1624.html Typical overall Factors of Safety Typical overall Factors of Safety: Equipment Factor of Safety - FOS - Aircraft components 1.5 - 2.5 Boilers 3.5 - 6 Bolts 8.5 Cast-iron wheels 20 Engine components 6 - 8 Heavy duty shafting 10 - 12 Lifting equipment - hooks .. 8 - 9 Pressure vessels 3.5 - 6 Turbine components - static 6 - 8 Turbine components - rotating 2 - 3 Spring, large heavy-duty 4.5 Structural steel work in buildings 4 - 6 Structural steel work in bridges 5 - 7 Wire ropes 8 - 9

This is a US document so US Factors of Safety so not the UK or EU standard. I know he is only the Program Manager of the Space Shuttle and not a UK person with Arts degree but here is what he says..... ( 1100% Factor of Safety for lifts aka elevators, ground equipment 400%. It is worrying that aircraft is 50%. One would not want to be travelling with a Rugby team. Nowhere, in any scenario, is the FoS as low as 20%.............. https://blogs.nasa.gov/waynehalesblog/2008/12/16/post_1229459081779/ Standards for factors of safety are all over the place. Most famously, the standard factor of safety for the cables in elevators is 11. So you could, if space allowed, pack eleven times as many people into an elevator as the placard says and possibly survive the ride. For many applications, 4 is considered to be a good number. In the shuttle program the standard factor of safety for all the ground equipment and tools is 4. When I was the Program Manager for the Space Shuttle, there were a number of times when a new engineering study would show that some tool either could be exposed to a higher maximum load than was previously thought, or that the original calculations were off by a small factor, or for some reason the tool could not meet the FS of 4. In those circumstances, the program manager – with the concurrence of the safety officers – could allow the use of the tool temporarily – with special restrictions – until a new tool could be designed and built. These “waivers” were always considered to be temporary and associated with special safety precautions so that work could go forward until the standard could once again be met with a new tool.

Kerb weight is the key one and also what is the Gross maximum vehicle weight... https://weightle.com/skoda-superb Many might be arriving to the car park with 4 adult passengers and some crap in the boot and therefore be around 2 tonnes. When items like car parks and lifts are designed, I recall from my materials classes at degree level that such constructs worked on a "Factor of Safety" of 20 times. So the material used would be twenty time stronger than the weight limit published so cars being 10% or 50% heavier is not getting even close to the actual limit for the structure. Much more important is materials losing half, 90%, 95% or 99% of their strength as the strength 30, 40 , 50 years after construction is far more relevant as corrosion of reinforcing, concrete cancer, the blocks turning in to the strength of Aero chocolate bar. Difficult to test how weakened it might be but strain gauges and deflection indicators might give so clues but also might not until it catastrophically fails.

Not mandatory but perhaps should be. Fear is such that I will drive through the Cotswold villages rather than the M40 as it is shorter but it is many miles less distance. Is this what the NIMBY Tories in the leafy well to do village want to see ? Plan ones route planner to do the shortest route rather than the fastests or eco route and then try and drive like the crow flies. One can end up doing 10 or 20% less miles.

Before I took up my Executive Officer position HMC&E I did a stint as an AO with DoT and I recall we used The Forth Law as that was the damage ratio.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law So a 10% higher weight is nearly 50% more damage, that should capture those heavy EVs, and Chelsea tractors etc.

Governments have to collect taxes to run infrastructure and have a framework that is voted through parliament by our representatives. Tax policy changes like charging diesels extra road tax once discovered they were far more polluting than initially thought ie good on CO2 but bad on NOX, PMs etc. Always tough when policy pivots. Agree, and a Mr Jazzer HUNT says the UK is in a bad place with huge interest payments of £100B a year on its £2.6T debt (and that does not include the estimated £2T of future public servant pensions which have no fund to be paid from and are paid from the UK's current account). https://www.irishtimes.com/business/2023/09/07/uk-said-to-be-low-on-options-for-escaping-its-29tn-debt-trap/ https://www.pensions-expert.com/DB-Derisking/Public-sector-pension-bill-exceeds-UK-GDP-for-the-first-time?ct=true Taxes need to be collected by the UK people are already paying more tax as a percentage of income, something like 47% when income tax and indirect taxes are factored together. As I have said I have no problem pay road tax on my EV but still have not heard an effective way of collecting tax on the electrical power I put in it.

One also learns that taxes have to be effectively collectable which is why hydrocarbon duties are is such a doddle ie collecting it as it leaves the refinery. Only difficulty with that is in some case is much fuel that is used in the UK is legally imported such as trucks bringing in thousands of litres in their tanks, driving on British roads hundreds of miles and returning to the continent never having bought fuel in the country where much driving has been done. Belfast, Northern Ireland taxi drivers nipping across the border to buy cheaper Irish Republic diesel and then use it for passenger fares operating in Northern Ireland, rarely buying UK-NI diesel and the tax going to London government but buying fuel where the tax goes to Dublin. Truck drivers regularly go back and worth across the channel making as much in bootlegging tobacco, cigarettes, hand rolling etc, as they do with their wages. 70% of hand rolling used in the UK was boot legged, some even legally brought in, as HMRC would collect the bin at football matches to see how many packets of cigs and hand rolling were EU sourced many millions going to the EU tax coffers rather than UK. Taxes have to be economic to collect. My 500w of solar would be economic to collect ? Do not use it half the year, only worth putting out in to the centre of the garden on a sunny day. BIt different with ANPR cameras and a car using the road with clear number plates. I welcome the registration of scooters but my would still be illegal as it is 3 times the allowed power output. They would have to dyno it as it is not obvious. Got to be both effectively collectable and aligned with government objectives and stopping or slowing people making electricity which means less dirty power station having to come on will not be seen as a good environmental move I would think.

Problem could be that even less people go in to cities from the suburbs and inner city business continue to die. If motorway cost more to drive on, and one trends to drive further if one uses the motorway that a more direct A road then NIMBYs will complain about extra traffic through their quiet towns. Fraught with problems.

With World EV day coming up on this Saturday like to wish all other enlightened EV drivers a happy cheap, quite and fun accelerating day for 9th of the 9th 2023. A Youtube from ZAP map on the growth of public chargers in the last dozen years to feed our EVs on those trips.....

WVO, waste vegetable oil ahh. Had some fun as a customs officer sample farmers land rover tanks for Red Diesel and if found they expected a fine. Were not so chuffed when told we were seizing the vehicle. Same thing for vehicles with cans of fuel/diesel bought cheap in Ireland/EU, seizes the fuel and, wait for it, the vehicle as well. There are customs entries for electricity and therefore a commodity code, looks like Excise duties to, did not know that. Perhaps this is the way to tax electricity as if there is an excise duty on imports there should be an excise duty on electricity production even from homes ? Less than a penny per kWh which could take an EV 4 miles compared to Excise duty at 52p a litre which might take you 10 miles, plus VAT at 20%. VAT at 5% for domestic or zero if one has generated it oneself, for now at least. £7.75 / 1,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) https://www.trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/commodities/2716000000 My solar arrays are not on my roof but on frames in my garden. A survey of roofs would not identify I had solar panels generating electricity. Government would have to do drone overflies to see I had solar panels. How they would measure such a thing is beyond me, have to think on that one. Perhaps people will get net to camouflage solar installs with nets like people do with cannabis plantations ?

BIrmingham's new EV charging hub. Odd mix of very high power and very low power. Would have been nice to have some 50s, 22s perhaps. https://www.google.com/search?q=nec+charging+hub&rlz=1C1GCEA_enGB942GB942&oq=NEC+charging+hub&aqs=chrome.0.0i512j0i390i650l4.4621j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&safe=active&ssui=on#ip=1 180 charge points. 7 kws will be fine when I am attending a show like Multi-modal for a few hours.

Chemicals to stop corrosion I think.

Avoidance is legal and in fact encouraged, like EV salary sacrifice, which is there to have positive side effects, as is salary sacrifice for pension savings, 40k, 50k, 60k a year as recently the threshold has been raised. Also like bonded warehouse, inward processing relief schemes that I deal with. All tax avoidance scheme UK gov encourages.

How ? As a professional tax collector, and more recently professional tax avoider, just how will the government increase the tax on EVs, other than road taxing EVs like ICE which we EV drivers are expecting ?

Government can try and collect money from EV owners but that is going to be to most difficult of tasks. Oil Excise duty is the most efficient tax there is, collect the money as the oil leaves the refinery, a small team of Excise Officers collect billions a year in Excise duties and the VAT team do that as well. There is even VAT on the Excise duty, ta on tax, ha ha. As to electricity I can download to the house when its super cheaper, send it to the Ev on the drive, pay of 5% ad valorem taxation on that electricity or, if I am bothered, I can use electricity I have collected from sunlight and put that in my EV. I have already has the EV grants for car and charger, there might no be anymore such grants but EVs are making their own economic case as they become cheaper and cheaper, have more and more range and ways of charging get cheaper too. My only EV charge I have done is via my Electoverse Octopus card, no prepayment that I am aware of, I get a discount off the unit cost of electricity and it is billed on to my monthly Octopus home account, yes even for electricity from public chargers, and if i use quite a lot and my DD needs to go up then fair enough. Octopus kindly gave me £10 credit to get started with on Electoverse, still only used £8 of it. Currently paying £125 a month for home electricity, which includes 7k miles of EV charging plus the house use and home gas as well and for a bit of public EV charging and I am over £200 in credit with Octopus going in to the winter and looking at Octopus doing big price falls in unit price of lecky/gas in both 10 days and 23 days time. EV charging, what hassle ? Charge at home, almost never have to charge away from home unless at free destination chargers. Hassle taking the petrol hybrid, stopping at motorway service to be ripped off with petrol at £1.78p a litre just because that is when the fuel light came on, pay more than 5 times the cost per mile for the energy upload of petrol rather than electricity (fortunately I do not fully pay as pay for gas with company fuel card). Brilliant EVs coming in at less that £40k RRP for great PCP and lease details. Maybe government will reduce or eliminate salary sacrifice for EVs, such deals can easily save me £200 a month as a higher rate ie 40% tax payer, even paid 45% at the beginning of this tax year, that could save government loads as stop giving double benefits to already well off who are paid north of £50k a year. Oil is easy to collect tax on, electricity, no chance. Road tax yes coming in eventually in couple of years time. Road pricing, good luck with that if you are ready to see people stop using motorways and coming through the cities, towns and villages like we have people circumventing the Birmingham toll road. They need to have a good think on this.

There is no real chance that the EV uptake will stall, it is just a juggernaut now and there are just so many positives, nearly all financial, that make it an inevitability. I anticipate some slowing if the EU car makes canvas the EU to add Anti-Dumping to Chinese made EVs, it what the EU does in so many cases, even did it for some solar equipment parts incredibly. Just taxed my year old Arkana, UK gov want £16 a month road tax, my Zoe is free, has been for 2 years, will be for another two years. Zoe will be serviced later this month, a B service, less than £150 quid, Arkana will be nearly twice that. Zoe costs less than a five for its nearly 250 miles of range, Arkana cost about £80 to fill up or £25 to splash a dash 250 miles of range and at that is at today's prices which ae 6p a litre more than 3 months ago and Saudi has said it is going to maintain is million barrel a day cut in production for the rest of the year so we are nearly at £7 a gallon and when is it going to level off again, spring next year ? Dacia Spring in RHD is only a few months away from being launched, massively popular car on the continent. Month to month running cost ie PCP plus fuel, likely to be cheaper than the ICE equivalents. So barring the UK, and/or the EU, stopping these Chinese cars coming in the EV to ICE equality in overall cost looks like coming in next year and that should bring another batch of doubters over from the Dark side.

I think I will keep my setup the flexible low tech way and it is just what to add to my Allpowers and Bluetti setup. Bjorn Nyland loves his Ecoflow and Ecoflow extra battery when he does his drive an EV until it dies then get the Ecoflows out of the boot, connects the Granny cable and tries to revive the EV but these "solar Generator/ battery/ inverter" thing-me-a-bobs can go by ones large consumption devices at home or in the boot of the car and certainly will come with me when I move to my castle in Wales when I go in to survivor mode. Question is what box to get next. Looking at around 3 kwh, 3 kw DC to AC inverter and circa 1 kW solar controller and to pay less well than 50p per Wh/W battery/inverter ie about a grand or thereabouts.

One youtube video recommended not suing pay at pump but going in to the shop to pay as then it is just treated as a normal transaction and no pre-authorising reserving up to £130 which is the UK maximum and some have reserved I gather. I use a company fuel card for most of my purchases and then oft go in to the TESCOs shop to buy a meal deal , or two, and use the TESCO points if we ae filling up the ETECH full hybrid but that is doing around 70 mpg so does not need filling very often but certainly pay at pump will be used much less as word gets around and people bank accounts get even more stretched as we go deeper in to the cost of living crisis due to mortgage and credit card debt. First charge up in the EV was a doddle with the Electoverse, one card to rule them all. Nip off a get the McDs, no smelly carcinogenic fuel handling, I never use to use the gloves, some places even do gloves for the EV charging leads, wonder what that it to guard against, horrible to think but perhaps I should have my own gloves ready.

I reckon it is at least 10 years old but possibly much older than that, could be 15 or so and I would not been surprised. Checked my Octopus Go records and when I was away and there was nobody in the house and only the fridge freezer was on, plus a couple of energy efficient lights the daily bill was about £1.05 so fair the fridge freezer is the lion's share at a pound a day. But this is when I am not home and can do some energy management. Downloading 2 kwh in to the solar generators during the 7.5p per kWh period 0030 to 0430, generating some solar during the day, sometimes 0.5 to 0.75 kwh mean I am running the fridge for about 15p a day rather a £1 which is fine but yes I do think I could get a fridge of similar size ie 1.8m tall and standard width which probably uses say half to two thirds the power. It is going to be less worthwhile doing anything in ten days time as my Octopus day rate for electricity drops from 40p per kWh to 29p per kWh so I will be less bothered but then I will also get very little solar but also my nighttime rate is going up from 7.5p per kwh to 9.5 per kWh so much less incentive to faff around ie now can save myself a quid but from the electricity tariff changes it might be around 50p but certainly very much less. I will continue to charge the Zoe up in the cheap lecky power time but cannot see it being worth messing around with the fridge but I may look at getting a new fridge perhaps in the black friday events. Octopus Go still the right tariff for me I think and with Octopus acquiring Shell electricity supply contracts Octopus will be no 2 in the UK, might even move my broadband to them and Octopus Electroverse scheme for discounted public EV charging is a plus but it is looking like TESLA could blow even Octopus out of the water with their new V4 chargers and tariffs so low that charging at home, outside the 4 hour cheap window, could well be cheaper at the V4 chargers, what is cheaper than free ? Sister very happy with her EDF fixed energy contract, which she got for 3 years a couple of years ago, must have cost nationally owned EDF many millions in selling energy cheaper than they can generate it, I am sure my sister would like to thanks the French government and people for that subsidy. In the UK the next 1.4 Gw power link from Scandinavia has been turned on, after the Norwegian one a year or two ago this is a Danish link. I would have thought Germany would buy all the spare lecky Denmark could generate but that is now more than half again as to what they need so presumably the Danes can get a better price off the Brits. It is clear to see that electricity can be generated on a ever decreasing, in real terms, per unit cost and I just hope that translates to the consumer although, as I said above, if it is so cheap then I am less likely to buy a new fridge which is not so good for climate change I suppose. I gather UK Grid is going to work with Octopus again this winter and we will have saving sessions where we basically can get back ten times the cost of power if we do not use a certain peak times ie when the wind is not blowing at the North Sea wind farms are not producing the GWs of power they can and the French and other interconnectors cannot supply all UK needs.

Crude oil up 6 pence per litre in the last 3 months which is now filtering through to the pumps. Inflation going to blip in September even the UK Chancellor admits. Saudi wants to keep the price up and Brent is nearly $90 a barrel, up from about $77 a barrel to $89 with the autumn/winter season approaching.

Tapioca disaster in Cardiff (I think it was actually Barry but there about), 1500 tonnes of Tapioca, along with a cargo of wood, wood caught fire and started to cook the tapioca. 7 food disaster including the tapioca one, ships was distorted after this and only fit for scrap I gather..... https://allthatsinteresting.com/deadly-food-disasters

Not sure what a normal ship is but in the bulk carriers I served on we had CO2 flooding for the engine room. Engine room being around 30m wide, 40m long and 50M high. Dozens of full sized CO2 bottles ie about 1.5m high bottles with about a diameter around 30 cms or so, a bank of around a hundred of them. Yes we would use sea water fire pumps, either from the engine room or the forecastle, which was about 250M or 700 foot from the engine room. Any experienced and good sailor would not to pour much water on cargo like grain which could expand and split the ship like a opening zip if it expanded.

Means he can hand it back no ? Why was he so concerned about its current value then ? Or the cost of a battery if fully comp as well as under warranty ?

Mr Taycan owner proves one can be rich enough to buy a Porsche EV but too dumb to run one.

The EU had rules on VAT/GST/TVA sales tax which was to have zero rate and standard rates which must be at least 15% and then one can have a reduced rates, UK chose 5% and used for domestic gas and lecky and there is the option for a super rate, which some EU countries used for luxury cars, could be as high as 34%, which the UK has never used. So UK could have altered VAT rates on the 1st of January 2021, it can also tweak excise duty rates on fuel and lots of other goods as well as alcohol, hydrocarbons for vehicles and tobacco. Generally UK, whilst not lowering sales tax has kept fuel duty much lower than inflation. UK government is trying to get much more tax receipts by keeping the income tax thresholds and probably will get quite a bit more income tax, VAT receipts may well be lower as car sales to individuals take a dive, PCP and general lower purchasing of big ticket items to generate VAT. Reducing VAT might have helped inflation not peak at high as 11% but also unemployment risking from 4% to 4.2% and probably going higher still. VAT can be avoided by having a VAT registered company and UK VAT law is constantly evolving, which is little publicised like the one with PCP VAT.... https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/revenue-and-customs-brief-1-2019-change-to-the-vat-treatment-of-personal-contract-purchases/revenue-and-customs-brief-1-2019-change-to-the-vat-treatment-of-personal-contract-purchases Tax avoidance is still a massive "industry". My time at pwc, one of the big 4 Accountancy/Consultancy firms was an eye opener as to the business of accountancy and tax consultancy. Many of us in the business were ex-government departments, Inland Revenue, HMC&E, striving to work on tax avoidance (legal), and not evasion (illegal) of course. UK government makes these tax raising decisions, is trying to make their massive national debt not get out of control ie go well over 100% of GDP during this time of high interest rates, UK two year Gilts around 5% and looking at the 5 and 10 year Gilts it is looking like we could be seeing UK inflation around 4 or 3% years in to the future rather than the 1 or 2% we got use to for the last decade. This will affect our ability to buy big ticket items as well as the day to day cost of living. Even being a massive UK government critic must have some sympathy for the financial hit of the pandemic and then the natural gas market spike post Russia-Ukraine. The great thing about electric cars, over cars powered by oil is electricity can be generated in many ways and the tech, and cost, is improving by 10% or more on the vehicle, the generation and the storage which oil has the issue that much of supply is in the hands of despots.