Using your opponents name in a way that goes completely against that opponent’s tenets is childish and unprofessional. But what would a gooey Santorum smear like Rep Chip Roy know about professionalism anyway?

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The problem with that approach is that the “rugged energy individualist” idea would only a thin veneer and as soon as you scratch the surface you see it isn’t true.

Currently technology solar isn’t able to affordably support the amount of energy consumption most Americans have or want. It would be either astronomically expensive for a single American household to have enough energy systems to be completely 100% self sufficient (in most States in the Union) or the American household would have to drastically reduce its energy consumption. I don’t know if you know us Americans, but we don’t like to cut back on anything.

The feasible technology we have today that is still expensive, but at least attainable by many, is for 30% to 70% household energy generation. The remainder (depending on the time of year) comes from our socialized system of central energy generation and distribution (the power grid).

I say this as someone with solar panels and EVs that has gone carbon free energy at home. Its expensive for the equipment and installation and still doesn’t cover all the energy needs year-round. Nine months out of the year we have no energy bills. Three months of the year, we do. That’s just physics and the limits of my wallet.

I have three potential service goals: essential power, whole house, and finally whole house and shop. I’d rather start on the small side, but want to be able to reuse gear, if at all possible, as I go up in capacity.

There’s a downside to that approach. Thats essentially two different scenarios (partial and full). Unless you get into complicated load shedding, you’ll potentially have to get some pretty monstrous batteries which can get expensive quickly. You might even have to size up inverters to offer the instantaneous power demand that you might get with running the house and some large power tools simultaneously. If you don’t you’ll trip breakers and then have no power anywhere until you manually shed some loads.

I think its common to think about these min-max scenarios about squeezing every bit of efficiency out of a solar system deployment. I encourage others to go down this through process, but don’t get too discouraged at the end when you start looking about why this gets really complicated really quickly.

In your example of trying to bypass the PC power supply and feed DC power directly to the PC, I can think of a number of challenges to that working (or being reliable).

• Even if you’re avoiding the switch from DC to AC and then back to DC inside the computer, that does nothing to step down the voltage produced by the panels. In a PC you need the following voltages 3.3V, 5V, 5Vsb, -12V, and +12V. On a PV solar system, you’d get anywhere from 18v on a single small panel, to 60v on a large panel, to 400v on a whole residential array.

• Just because the panels are producing DC doesn’t mean its necessarily clean. DC just means the current flow never switches direction. Lets say you set up a whole bunch of buck converters to produce all the right voltages to feed an ATX power supply. What happens when you get a cloud shadow moving across the array and the power produced drops for a few seconds? PCs are expecting very clean, very predictable power. That voltage sag would likely be enough to interrupt the operation of the PC.

Would it be possible to engineer a high quality power supply with enough capacitance and batteries to provide clean power from solar? Sure, but that’s a pretty complicated engineering exercise. You’ve already go two very well designed power systems: the inverter(s) from your array and your PC power supply. The only cost is 3% DC to AC conversion loss.

Unless you constantly want to be messing with your solar deployment, you quickly realize that reliability is usually the state to optimize for. Get your system working at a decent expected state that will stay working without intervention for a long long time. Optimize elsewhere.

I’d need a reason to use Edge. If it used a different browser engine, that would be a compelling reason.

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Thats the description of both Vivaldi and Brave browsers, which also haven’t out-Chromed Chrome. Both are Chrome engine with built in ad blockers.

Hey Microsoft, how about innovating instead? Edge is a Chrome engine browser like dozens of others out there. Why not write a new browser engine to give customers a choice? Or at worst, how about contract with Apple to license Webkit bringing a third solid choice for a browser engine to Windows. You’re not going to out-Chrome Google Chrome browser, so stop trying.

You can’t hand wave this problem away, saying you get what you pay for (also a common saying in the West). It’s systemic. Also, I’ve taken risks buying more expensive versions of the same products and had the exact same result.

…and…

So I ask you this: Was it the parents fault for feeding their babies contaminated baby formula? Should the people who installed toxic drywall have known better? Did the people who died from contaminated blood thinner deserve it for being poor consumers?

There’s another element of Chinese culture you’re missing and it is that of “miànzi” (面子) or “face” as in our version of the phrase “saving face”, or figuratively “reputation”. The sellers do care about their reputation, but there are different groups they care about and groups they may not. You’re likely a western end user retail customer. Most probably don’t care about you. They might care about their reputation with their western reseller customers though.

The examples of poison drywall or adulterated formula are very bad by both Chinese and Western standards, but for slightly different reasons. The western view it as bad because it harmed the end consumers. The Chinese view would be a loss of face of the seller for being such a public and shameless scam without integrity or honor, a huge loss of face.

No one seems to care in China. It’s like you say, making money is all that matters.

You’re close to understanding, but you’re still missing it. Again, you’re judging this by western standards. Now, I’m western, and I like the western standards, but I also understand that their culture doesn’t have to conform to ours for it to be “right”. There is no objectively right way to do this. We’re all different humans figuring different systems. I certainly have my preference for the western style, but that doesn’t make what the Chinese have been doing for hundreds (3000 thousand, if you ask the Chinese) of years they’ve been doing less “right”.

Let me tell you something: Toys made in West go through such testing. It was a lesson learned in blood over decades.

That’s a very recent addition to western culture. Lots of toys even during my lifetime were dangerous. Two generations back, in the USA we had toys like this which heated up to 260 °C (500 °F):

Which caused serious burns and even some deaths for the children playing with them.

In the 1950s this was a toy:

You’re bringing your perspective of individualism which is very much a Western idea. Other cultures don’t come from that perspective and arrive and different conclusions. I can tell you, we’ll see more of this press up on our western culture as trump continues to flounder our dominance and China continues to rise.

I’m also apply the same logic to Americans. If a USA of the future is the trumpian-style, I’d rather have a strong China to act as a check on US power. We, the USA, are a negative force on the world right now under trump.

I can go on and on about the poor quality of tons of Chinese-made products but you get the idea. Having said that, there’s plenty of great Chinese brands that make quality stuff. It’s just that there’s so much more cheap/generic stuff from China that competes with the good stuff it gets drowned out.

What you are experiencing is a different cultural approach that the west frequently fails to get what they expect. There’s a concept of “if you ask for bottom dollar prices, you’re going to bottom tier products”. Paraphrasing even further put another way “why are you complaining about getting junk when you’re only willing to pay junk prices?”. Get acquainted with the Chinese phrase “chàbuduō” (差不多). It literally translates to “a little bit less than all”, but figuratively translates to “close enough”. This is a very common phrase and idea in Chinese culture. If you’re buying the cheapest version of something you’re going to get a product that is likely not up to spec, but “close enough”. The second phrase you should know is “méi bàn fǎ” (没办法). This one figuatively translates to: “nothing can be done” or “it can’t be helped”. When you point out something isn’t up to what you expect, you should be ready to hear this phrase and understand that the person or company you’re dealing with isn’t interested in changing the situation and are simply washing their hands of the issue leaving you with it.

Neither of these are failings of Chinese culture, its just different. The failing would be expecting all other cultures to behave like our own.

If you don’t want the bad product, buy the more expensive version. As you said, you can absolutely get very high quality products from China, but you’re not getting those for a tiny fraction of the price of high quality goods from other sources.

To me this means the propaganda is stopping to work for increasing number of people.

I have different reading of the data. Essentially there are two superpowers today: USA and China. No one wants to be ruled by another country, but the dominant superpower has that power to shape policy around the world through military and economic actions.

What I’m seeing is that trump made the USA so unpalatable with his actions that China becomes the lesser of two evils. So its not so much that China’s bad behavior are erased, but given the choice of China or the USA leading the world, the world is rejecting the USA.

Ifs been awhile since I’ve seen the first DS9 episode, but wasn’t the assignment to of Sisko to DS9 supposed to be a low burden job? He’s lost his wife at Wolf359 and was raising a young son by himself. It just turned into a hotbed of interest with the discovery of the worm hole.

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35 years?! That can’t be right.

“PEX (cross-linked polyethylene) was invented in 1968 by German scientist Dr. Thomas Engel. It was first introduced for commercial use in Europe during the early 1970s and became widely used in North America starting in the mid-1980s, initially for radiant floor heating before moving into plumbing.”

I had no idea there have been commercial PEX installations going on 55 years old now.

I have PEX. Now I’m worried. What problems were you encountering that this was the best solution?

Thats a good question. I don’t know.

The green circled one is a perfect solder joint. The yellow one has a bit too much solder, but its still fine. It was heated enough for the solder to flow around the connections of the work. The red one could be better. It looks like you had a good solder joint when you put that resistor on, but then later it looks like you came back with a solder covered wire to run the connection over to the contact on the right. The fact I’m not seeing deformation of the resistor solder joint when the wire was attached makes me think you might have a cold solder joint there at the resistor for the wire.

Honestly, for this simple circuit all your solder joints are at least passable if not perfect. I doubt this board would ever be in circumstances that any of these solder joints would fail.

A few other things that I’ve learned over decades of soldering:

• Soldering is the act of heating the work not the solder. When the work is hot enough, the solder will melt and flow over the connection.
• Good soldering is moving the heat into the work as efficiently as possible with the shortest time so as to not damage the board or the components. If you place a “dry” iron tip against the work a shockingly small surface area will actually be in contact with the work to transfer heat. Instead “wet” the iron it with just a tiny bit of solder. It will liquefy instantly and sit as a small liquid ball on the tip of your iron. That ball of liquid solder will squish around whatever shape you’re applying the tip to providing an excellent thermal bridge to move the heat into the work.
• All soldering irons have a “heat battery”. Here’s a bunch of them I circled in green:

Typically inside that section is not only the heating element but a dense piece of material. Usually ceramic but sometimes metals. They all perform the same function. When the heating element heats up, heat is drawn off the element into the dense material in the iron. When you place the tip of the iron on the work, most of the heat is draining from that dense material, and only a bit from the heating element itself.

The consequence to this is that if you’re soldering lots of small points back-to-back, or a very large contact just once, you can drain all the usable heat out of the iron and still not bring the work up to the right temperature for solder to flow right. If solder starts acting weird and plastic like after you’ve solder a bunch of points, simply set the iron back on its rest and wait for a minute or so for the iron to fill its heat battery back up. After that you’ll see the solder behaving how you expect.