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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • A small town near me got in deep shit for being small town assholes recently. That and embezzlement. This town is on a major highway to Myrtle Beach. They also prided themselves on the “safety” and “smallness” of their town, while also preying on vacationers.

    Their municipal police police would aggressively enforce the speed limits. Every time I had to go through there you’d see someone running speed at nearly every speed zone change. As little as one to two mph over would get you an interaction with them. They also would issue tickets for far more than was normal. Up to 10 over was easily a $400 ticket, when most places would only do $150. They were also kind and polite about it. They’d offer to take payment right then and eliminate the speeding points. Which was the issue.

    If you paid there they wouldn’t report the ticket. Or the cash. The town kept the money; the town was making about a million a year. You were fined under a safety ordinance and not traffic law. They were also supposed to share portions with the county and state, but didn’t. They argued that it was not a traffic violation. This town of barely 700 people had fifteen police just running speed traps.

    They eventually were found out, and the municipal police department was heavily curtailed. The county manages speed through there and is nowhere as aggressive about it.

    An article about this situation.












  • So, working for a power company, I have some insight for you on this. This is still the power companies doing bullshit, but there is some truth to the grid being unable to handle electric vehicles. We are seeing the same issue with electric tankless water heaters.

    Most companies, unless you ask and pay for it, will size a transformer for your house as small as they can get away with. 15 to 25kVA is kinda standard for overhead, while 50 to 75kVA for padmount is usual (because the same transformer will serve two to four houses).

    If you install a fast charger on your house, and run the dryer, and the water heater turns on, the fuse will blow on the transformer. Then you call in an outage, they have to put a new fuse on, and usually don’t tell you what was wrong. Then once you figure it out, they have to tell you that you can’t do all that (and lose revenue from all the downtime and sending a technican) or they have to put up a bigger transformer.

    It’s far easier to say “lol our grid is old and bad” than “we don’t want to spend out profits on needed upgrades and maintenance”. Meanwhile, data centers are exclusively connected directly to a substation that can handle their needs or to their own dedicated transformer banks directly off of transmission lines. Never are they on some back woods tap fifteen miles from their substation.