eigenvector

It's not a hidden charge because as you said, you can still travel without paying it.

And it provides a method of price discrimination between people who care where they sit and those who don't.

A hidden charge would be if you had to pay for seat selection to sit anywhere at all and it wasn't included in the original price.

Most of the van life you see depicted on social media is actually this though - people who've rented a van short-term for as much as a hotel room or who live in a house and have a van that costs as much as a second home as an accessory for weekend trips.

People who actually live in vans are far less common than people who take photos of themselves in vans.

If people want to use less electricity, they need to have reasonable options to do so in the marketplace without needing a computer engineering degree to figure what sleep states their motherboard supports. That's one purpose of these regulatory mandates: to make the market more transparent and efficient.

Consumers shouldn't have to waste time sorting through products that are broken from day 1 in non-obvious ways.

Red tape is definitely an issue, but freight costs to Nepal are also extremely high. It's a landlocked country with very poor transportation networks. Air courier (eg DHL) to Kathmandu is in the range of $5/kg, and if the final destination is in a village it needs to be hand-carried there. So accessing cheap stuff from abroad is much harder than we might think coming from developed countries. There is no such thing as slapping on a FedEx label right to the final destination.

Any audio encoder - lame is an open source option for mp3 - will have low pass filters. Most encoders will filter inaudible frequencies to improve compression even if not told to, but there are explicit parameters you can set.

An important and related fact, addressed in the article, is that Amazon currently escapes consumer product liability laws because they are neither seller nor manufacturer. But they also cannot tell you with any degree of precision who the seller or manufacturer is.

There is a public interest in making /someone/ liable for defective products, as it provides a incentive for sellers to do due diligence on what they sell.

The party most able to root out sellers of defective or counterfeit goods is probably Amazon, but they currently have no incentive to do so as the liability is offloaded to judgement-proof Marketplace sellers.

Amazon's business innovation here is figuring out how to run a multi billion dollar retail business without product liability, and that's negative for society.

Search for any Costco-exclusive item on Amazon and you'll find exactly this strategy at work, complete with 300% markups on the Costco price.

Air source heat pumps are fine for the places where most Canadians live including southern Ontario & Quebec and coastal British Columbia. If you live in Winnipeg or Saskatoon it might be dicey, but unless it routinely drops below -20C for extended periods you're fine. And you can have backup resistive heating elements for the occasional cold snap anyways.

Are GP mentioned, the safety procedure to protect you from a line you're working on becoming inadvertently energized is temporary protective grounding. A grounding jumper is connected to each phase of the power line near the work location so that the worker touching the line works in a zone of equipotential. Because everything the worker is touching bonded together, if the line becomes energized the worker's hands and feet are elevated to the same voltage simultaneously, so there is no potential difference across the body and no current flows through the worker.

But since lives are at stake here, we prefer to have layers of protection rather than just one thing. Grounding jumpers can fail if not properly connected (a large mechanical force will be applied to the jumper when the phase-to-ground fault current flows through it).

Bottom line, respect the electrical code and connect generators through a transfer switch. These rules are in place for a reason.

> I personally believe that DHS should make this sort of thing illegal for critical infrastructure.

I can't speak to non-electrical infrastructure, but the NERC CIP "high impact" standards already make it largely impossible to operate critical electrical infrastructure from anywhere other than a secured control centre. Operating from your laptop or iPhone from the kitchen table is however allowed for "low impact" assets like small power plants.

Thanks for articulating this as I never understood why iOS suffers from this phenomenon. The only other place I've seen "typing too fast" result in garbled input is on Android based VoIP phone handsets, where if you try to "type" numbers too fast some of them get dropped - an amazing example of a device with many orders of magnitude more computing power than what it replaced still managing to be less performant.

No, but you at least realize an analog filter is a thing that exists. You don't remember the specifics, but you could study them if you needed to.

As a practicing EE (power systems), I agree. It often becomes clear when someone is unable to distinguish a practical limit (this equipment is not rated for X, our operating procedures prohibit doing X) from a physical one (X is not possible because of underlying physical principles).

The ostensible benefit to DC distribution in homes is to be more economical and simpler for devices that already run on DC - not to redesign ever device ever made to accept mains-voltage DC. If your iPad and your laptop and your blender still need a power brick to work, what's the point?

Using high-voltage unnecessarily to avoid using a DC converter is also not going to save money. Yeah, you can use a 300 V DC motor in a coffee grinder, but why? It's just going to cost more money to make.

As you note, for facilities like data centres that are engineered for a specific type of load, a building-level rectifier makes sense. For a home where you have many devices using a little bit of power at a variety of voltages, you're going to end up with lots and lots of small DC converters everywhere which defeats the point. Just run 120 VAC.