Spoilers:

Worst 10: Spain, Finland, Sweden, Greece, France, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Canada, Portugal.

Best 10: Netherlands, Iceland, Germany, Switzerland, Poland, South Korea, Japan, Malta, Czech Republic, Singapore.

Order in both lists is from higher to lower rate of unemployment, i.e. worst to best.

I don’t think much of these lists I guess. I keep hearing that Germany is hosed because of inflation outstripping earnings, and lots of Germans are moving to Austria because of that.

The lists generally don’t reflect anecdotal economic conditions in those places. So I’d like to see more direct numbers about median purchasing power and stuff like that. Also for work-seekers with some mobility, exactly what kinds of openings are there in a given country and what occupations are already glutted.

Music that takes focused listening, or else the kind that zones you out.

1 centaur = 1/2 human + 1/2 horse

1/2 human + 1/2 centaur = 3/4 human + 1/4 horse.

Yay math.

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Well I can probably get the Google APK one way or another. I’m just slightly afraid to install it.

Any trouble with or from the web view update itself?

The play store says it was just updated a few days ago. The comments are scary though. Yikes.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.webview

This still? Give it a rest.

I’d expect any online thing to be traced back to the person if it was juicy or otherwise usable as kompromat. There was just a news item about using LLM analysis to de-anonymize people, fwiw.

The one I have that turned on by accident has gotten quite loose and turns on too easily. The plastic might be worn from too much twiddling. I wonder if I can fix it somehow, like by adding a piece of tape around the rotating part. I have another one someplace but would would have to find it to compare them.

They do make a bigger one for dog collars or you could do something similar with a Photon-style keychain flashlight. The Ziplit’s tiny size is nice though.

Could be. I mostly want uniformity across UIs. So it would be cool to be able to configure Anduril to be like random light X.

You mean you found the AI slop with google, not much help.

I’ve generally heard that it’s ok to discharge LFP batteries to 0%. You just shouldn’t store them that way (or at 100%) for long periods. Keep in mind that LFP has maybe half the energy density of the highest density NMC batteries, and sodium has maybe half that of LFP. Sodium really doesn’t sound that good batteries for portable devices.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s not yet any sodium charging chip for small consumer electronics like this. I haven’t heard of a sodium powered flashlght, phone, or anything like that before. The only sodium consumer device I know of right now is a Bluetti power station which has 900WH: https://www.bluettipower.com/products/sodium-ion-battery-pioneer-na

It got some attention at its anouncement but tbh it’s 10lb heavier and $300 more expensive than the 1024WH lithium version (Elite 100v2). So it’s for early adopters only.

If you want to charge a small sodium cell, you can probably program an MCU to deliver the right charge profile, along with a few small external parts. That’s how Apple phones worked at least in the past. They saved a fraction of a penny by just incorporating some extra logic and code in their big ASIC instead of having a separate charging chip. It’s kind of interesting that the charger was programmed in Forth, on a special Forth processor (b16-small) that they cooked into a hardware macro: https://bernd-paysan.de/b16.html . They hired Bernd (the b16 designer) to write the code and it was pretty intricate because of the cpu’s limitations. I don’t think I’d have used that approach ;).

Wurkkos TS27 has an LFP battery and is beefy and advertised as a duty light, and it seems nice except then it has this silly RGB ring light that turns it into a fidget toy. I lost interest because of that. YMMV. :)

https://wurkkos.com/products/ts27

Added: I just looked over the kickstarter page for this light. The battery looks to be 10,000mAH nominal, size 32140 which is 4.7x the volume of a 21700. Voltage is 3.0 nominal but looking at the discharge curve at -20C it looks about 2.5V on average, so 25 WH. Not that much better than a 5000mAH 3.6V 21700 (18WH). The sodium is somewhat worse but still viable at -40C and I guess it might be beating lithium by then too, plus it has the ability to accept charging at -40C. I don’t see super-cold charging as very important for a flashlight (if you’re able to charge your light you can probably keep it at least a little bit warm), though super cold operation can be helpful.

Also, this is a 2500 lumen light which is a far cry from the old Maglights that were perfectly usable. The classic 2AA minimag was around 5 lumens over most of its runtime, the huge 6D was something like 36 lumens, and the nicad powered Magcharger was about 180 lumens. Surely for changing a fuse, a low powered headlamp is preferable to a huge handheld ;).

I guess they must have had better internet in the French Revolution than we have here now! Everyone hates Comcast and now you know why ;).

Sodium batteries are mostly of interest for grid storage or maybe stationary home batteries once they get cheap enough. They are sort of marginal for EV’s but might find a place in some cold weather ones. Having them in a few weird flashlights isn’t going to help ramp up manufacturing volume compared to that. The real demand will come from power utilities buying gigawatts at a time, not a few flashlight nerds.

I remember the Eternalight and it went through a few nicer incarnations over time The designer was a regular on Candlepower Forums. IDK if the company still exists. The product was cool in some ways. IIRC it uses 5mm leds. The first production flashlight with a Luxeon was the Arc LS and I had two of them. I think the semi-custom McLux TK may have been earlier but my memory by now is hazy. I still have mine. Sodium batteries are different. Aside from the very niche advantage in cold weather charging, they are worse in every way than lithium. The main feature that makes them interesting is potentially lower cost per KWH in the long run. That’s great if you want a 100KWH off-grid battery for home, and maybe it can find its way into economy EV’s. But nerdy flashlights, nah, battery costs are not much of an issue already. The bigger light and fancier charging and regulation circuitry negate any advantage. We could already use LFP batteries if we wanted to, but we almost never do.

No link?

Only living people can win the prize. If they die between the announcement and the ceremony they still get it posthumously. I’m pretty sure that has happened now and then.

JLR has been paralyzed for the past few weeks due to a cyber attack so the news is that they’re emerging from that.