The WARRANTY on modern PV panels is 25 years. The projected lifespan of those panels is closer to 50 years. You’ll probably be replacing the inverters every 20 years. Longer if modern inverters use better quality caps.

The panels may drop in production a little bit. You’ll get 80% or the original capacity after a 3-4 decades. So size the system a little bigger than you need.

Batteries are also dropping in price rapidly so that is a tough one to judge. Modern LFP batteries are rated for 4000+ cycles. Sodium ion just became commercially available at $100/kWh and 4500 cycle rating. If you design your battery to only use half of it’s capacity any day those are 20-25 year batteries. They are claiming the gen 2 sodium batteries may hit 10,000 cycles at $50-$75/kWh within 3-4 years. Those will be 30 year batteries by the sounds of it.

I’d just dig a 12”x12” or larger trench around that thing, add some rebar or at least wire mesh and just pour in concrete. Maybe go 18-24”on the side away from the gate if the earth is a bit soft, it will act as a counterweight.

When it’s dug out you may be able to pull it straight. Get a nice chain hoist or some 10,000lb ratchet straps and give it a anchor point 15-20’ away, pull the top back straight.

If you get it stable but not perfectly level, you can always hire a welder to fix the hinge one last time.

No way that fix is gonna cost you $14k.

Same thing.

The US also just got TAP, chip and pin(signature). Canada got chip and pin 20+ years ago and Tap in 2007.

So hopefully by 2047 America realizes that the penny is not worth actually printing anymore.

Because of taxes, a penny saved is a quite a bit more than a penny earned.

Of course, we discontinued the penny years ago. No one would even bend down to pick up a penny anymore.

Time to ‘tax’ those satellite companies by making them launch some radio telescopes into space. The proper place for them to be. Especially the far side of the moon.

Co2 is dying. It’s all about fibre lasers now. The cost of operation per hour is drastically better. You’ll see the CO2 laser market start to VHS over the next couple of years as the smaller and smaller fibre lasers get stupid cheap.

And I may have to make a fibre module add on for my plasma table. Because wow. $3k for that 1.5kW fibre laser is hard to argue with.

Did you read what I said before you downvoted me?

I read what the OP posted and felt it was important to add a disclaimer for the house to steps connection.

Edit: we are also both assuming concrete steps. But the OP doesn’t even say what kind of steps they are.

If it’s the gap between concrete stairs and a home you NEVER use mortar. The home and stairs have different thermal expansion characteristics. You need a sealant that remains soft and pliable.

That’s either going on IN China or in land China considers their own. The comment distinctly referenced foreign soil. Yes Taiwan is a touchy subject and calling that foreign or not is like having the correct answer for abortion or religion in government. I’m going to NOPE on that one.

Go look up China’s Belt and Road initiative. They are loaning poor countries billions for mega projects and pumping up how much it will help their economy. But they use mostly Chinese labour and then when the bills come due and the economic benefit never happened they take the project as their own. Check out the assorted sea ports like in Sri Lanka that China scooped up.

That right there is invasion through trickery, and how China is building foreign bases.

There you go shopping on aliexpress again.

I’m talking professional grade fully enclosed machine tools. Same as you would see in any professional fabrication shop.

You get what you pay for. When you see a shitty laser cutter with no enclosure, that is what you are getting.

Have you actually seen the mew machine tools China is spitting out? A friend of mine has purchased a CNC laser for $50k from china that will cut 1” plate all day long. I’m talking full machine in an enclosure and everything.

They also picked up a 1.5kW fibre laser for 3K for another CNC project.

If your view of what China is pumping out is the garbage they sell on Aliexpress, you are a fool. Try going to some trade shows or maybe go to China and see the industrial stuff first hand. Their equipment is getting to be just as good as the American machine tools for 1/4 the price.

This is exactly like in the late 70’s early 80’s when everyone LOL’d at ‘Jap scrap’. And they kept laughing through the 80’s while they didn’t notice it was getting better and cheaper than the domestically produced products. Then one day whoopsie. We got our asses handed to us.

Cars too. If you think Chinese cars are junk you had go better wander down to the local Volvo dealership and test drive a Polestar. It’s actually a Geele electric car that is better than anything the domestics are making. Did I mention China bought Volvo? China is also already making a lot of the electric driveline components in current EV’s.

China uses brains and trickery. America uses brawn and strong arm tactics.

China’s tech is rocketing ahead. Without a need to worry about patent infringement they can simply continue to evolve tech to work as good as possible. Our patent system needs to be drastically overhauled and patents need to be shortened to 5-7 years. 2-3 years for software patents.

China doesn’t do war on foreign soil. They simply buy their way in.

5-10 years ago the ‘spoken story creation software’ in the last season of Westworld was pure fantasy.

Now it’s highly plausible within a decade.

We get one step closer to Wall-E every day.

I have a very similar still perfectly functional crock pot. Still works.

However I ended up getting a instant pot. It won’t last as long but it’s a pressure cooker and a sous vide cooker. Actually being able to program the temperatures I desire vs ‘low and high’ is also a really big deal. The pressure cooker allowed me to reduce that cook time by 2/3 in some situations. Because it’s a pressure cooker it is also water tight and won’t lose moisture at low temperatures. I can make tomorrow’s dinner tonight. A 24 hour slow cook is amazing.

A pro chef friend turned me on to sous vide cooking. It is the high end restaurant cheat from hell. You do a rack of ribs for 24 hours then finish them in the broiler. Don’t even give your guests a knife. A fork is all you need.

Sometimes, it’s ok to retire obsolete tech when the new versions are simply much, much better.

That’s another solution programmed to self destruct in 1 generation. And that’s always the problem with these genetic bomb ideas. It will eventually kill the fix and the mosquitos left over will breed just fine.

For all the ahole downvotes, the guy isn’t wrong. Apple needs to get off it’s ass and improve the battery life drastically.

Researchers initially tried a interface port at the base of the spine. But testers reported that was a real ‘pain in the ass’ to insert.

Industrial robot guy here. Robots replace dirty dangerous dull jobs. They’re great at doing the same thing all day long. Every task you add to the list makes them 10x less reliable.

Basically if your job involves you sitting on your ass and doing one thing all day long you are in trouble. I can buy a $25k robot arm that is safe to work around humans and has a 10kg payload. It can sit there and do a simple task. It’s also a complete idiot and will fault out, wait for a human with the slightest disturbance.

You still need human operators to babysit them when things go wrong. The answer here is instead of 4 poorly paid idiots doing a repetitive task all day long, you pay one guy a decent living wage to keep those robots fed and happy. That guy might be able to figure out some basic programming like teaching some new points. Any serious integration or tooling work needs a guy like me who makes a pretty penny.

But I am sure there are punishments in hell less severe than sitting stationary for 8 hours a day and doing a repetitive task. I have zero issues with getting rid of those jobs. Especially when you discover those robots doubled your productivity and all of a sudden you need to hire another warehouse guy, another truck driver and another sales guy. Automation tends to simply shuffle jobs around while making a company grow.

But there is a need for those jobs as when I said you hire idiots I mean it. Smart people quit. You hunt for the most empty sad pathetic CV you can find to find a production worker who won’t quit by noon. Idiots need work too and I don’t know what society is going to do to keep them working. Tax the robots and pay the idiots to sit at home and make Lets Play videos?

The legal market pushed the illegal market back. No one makes contact with illegal dealers to score weed. The shady weed dealers all went out of business. Ordering online or going into a shop and selecting 1 of 50 varieties with various effects made the entire process so much better than the illegal market pale by comparison.

That not only keeps kids from buying weed, but also it destroys the sales link to the illegal market that also sells harder drugs. This reduces the amount of people climbing the drugs ladder.

So? Pumping it out of the ground isn’t harmful. Setting it on fire IS harmful.

We also recover it from our garbage dumps. Methane is in a lot of places. You can make a closed loop from a city composting collection project. Many cities do this and burn the methane in generators as that is the better alternative but it releases co2. Make fish food instead.

They are a delicious source of protein? That is A reason.