The usual story here (Vietnam) is that the victims are often promised a job with high earning prospect in Cambodia, or they are in debt after playing in casinos over there. Since Vietnam economy isn't in a good shape, there is no lack of potential victims. They don't really get killed either as it will cost the kidnappers, they will just get sold to another scam center. Oh and the victim can buy their freedom back if they scam enough people (my friend lost 10k USD in one such scam), not that there is many people who can do that though.
- settlements on river banks will be swept away
- the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe, ZNPP, won't be restarted due to lack of cooling
- Crimea will lost access to fresh water
- First line of defence for both sides are swept away.
- it will be harder for Ukraine side to mount an amphibious assault
I'm kinda happy for that power plant not to be restarted though.
It's much better for it to be in a shutdown state if it finds itself in the middle of combat again. I know Ukraine needed the power but it getting damaged could cause problems far beyond Ukraine. One Chernobyl was enough. But I hope it has enough cooling water to cool its storage reservoirs.
All the other effects are terrible of course :( And all favour Russia.
It will also make it easier for Ukraine to attack upstream when the reservoir is empty. In places where there are virtually no Russian defenses. So that's a win for Ukraine.
First, the reservoir won't empty completely. Second, if it were there will be meters of mud on the bottom of it. It's possibly more impassable when empty.
In short term yeah, it will probably be too muddy. But it will dry over time and in the long term this unlocked a completely new axis of attack for Ukrainians. Similarly in the downstream regions. The water will go away eventually and it will be much easier for Ukrainians to attack in the future, when the Russians will not have the capability to flood the downstream regions with this dam.
The Dnipro is still a large river to cross and it's not going away. I looked at it in Google Maps and it's at least 500 m wide before and after the reservoir.
I am actually not sure how wide it will end up. Dnipro is actually reservoirs all the way up to Kyiv. It will be Ukrainians in Dniper HES that will control the flow from now on.
I really love my Steam Deck, until it suddenly died a few days ago. Couldn't even get to BIOS menu and just a black screen with CPU fan and haptic on, tried everything from reseating battery, putting in battery storage mode, replacing the NVME or even running fsck on another linux machine, nothing works. It seems to be a common issue with the Deck :( Now I have to find a way to RMA it, which will take months as they don't sell it where I live.
As someone who have learned a lot from ih8mud, thank you for helping such a great community! I live in a 3rd world country where it's very hard to get proper maintenance services like in America, ih8mud is the reason why I picked the FZJ80.
(now, if only I can find the emission manual for the 1fz-f...)
This is why I love my 80 series Land Cruiser (carb, not EFI), it's really simple that a lot of maintenance can be done with just wrenches. And the charm of having almost no electronics[1] on the car control is that if something is wrong, you will know it by the sounds it makes, and you will have a lot of times to fix it before it's completely toast. I have heard of horror stories about newer cars with electric ABS accumulator that stopped working on the high way, not with my FZJ80[2].
[1] The so called 'emission computer' unit on the car is a simple pulse counter/comparator that activates a VSV on the carb to reduce backfire while descending downhill with the foot off the throttle.
[2] My brake booster is leaking a little bit, but at least it won't suddenly gives up on me while I'm riding, still looking for a replacement.
Those are excellent vehicles indeed. Unfortunately they're also very expensive to maintain. As for a brake booster, I once swapped a booster from a 1990's Toyota pickup into a FJ55. Would you believe it bolted to the firewall? Might be a worthy swap in your FJZ80.
OEM parts can be really expensive, but there are also choices of buying aftermarket ones (mostly made in China) or salvaging from another ones. Near where I live there is a guy who salvages Land Cruisers for a living, he has more than hundreds frames lying around in his yard. Since most of the Land cruisers here have 3rd world spec (carb-ed and detuned engine, part time 4WD, mechanical gas pump etc...), the used parts are often in very good condition. Take the dreaded blown head gasket for example, I rarely see that here because 1FZ-F doesn't run as hot as 1FZ-FE. Or the Birfield, most people just run on RWD mode so they are often pristine.
(of course for something critical such as brake booster I would only use OEM).
So that's like what, 82 in Town and Country years?
Point being, 200k and 25yr on an SUV isn't that impressive on something expensive enough in its day to mostly avoid being rode hard and put away wet from day one. There are a lot of pretty pristine 90s Jags kicking around too and they weren't exactly the pinnacle of reliability. Minivans, commuter compacts, station wagons, they got chewed up and spit out.
What kind of fuel consumption do you get on that? I've been considering getting an older vehicles exactly for that reason (and you can easily tinker with it), but I'd imagine the fuel consumption is a lot higher than a modern vehicle, to the point where you are not saving anything by being able to fix it yourself.
My 1997 LX450 (4.5L I6) with armor (front/rear bumpers, sliders), a roof rack, other random accessories with a 2.5" lift and 33" tires gets about 11 MPG highway, and maybe 7-9 city. I take it off-road often, and on trails I get maybe...4-6?
It does come with the territory though, and anyone owning an 80 (and probably a 100 series) at this point isn't doing it really to "save money" imo.
That being said, the recently outgoing 200 series LC didn't really do all that much better[1], and neither does the new 300 series.[2]
Do people ever give you grief about the climate impact of owning a vehicle like that?
I don't mean to judge and am genuinely curious -- I have a fairly fuel inefficient vehicle as well and it weighs on me sometimes that I maybe should try different, more climate friendly hobbies (like, stopping overlanding and pick up knitting or something...)
Yes, but the service life of a Land Cruiser 200 series is 25 years. There’s a profound amount of environmental impact beyond the gas pump, and most of it comes from building and shipping all the parts to assemble the automobile over and over again. The manufacturing process is profoundly environmentally destructive, so vehicles that have a longer service life (Land Cruiser is 2-2.5 times the average) have a role to play.
They are also one of the few petrol vehicles that are still built to this kind of standard, so they do demonstrate as the “smoking gun” that the industry itself engineers obsolescence into their vehicles and could do much better.
Somehow we’ve all been reduced to yakking on and on about fuel economy. There are 30,000 parts in the average car, and almost all of them are manufactured and shipped. What’s the impact of tens of thousands of components and built onsite for JIT manufacturing?
If we wanted to change this, we could do very easily. We would just need to put a sticker in the window of the car that says: “Designed to Last: 12 years” or whatever. That way people could make an informed decision and game theory would come in to effect. Auto makers know this information: every car has a design life of you wouldn’t have anything like the “25 year design life” of a Land Cruiser in the first place.
I consider it the impact of car and oil company propaganda, as they’ve narrowed the discussion to “miles per gallon” rather than the overall impact of design life and the constant need to remanufacture the same vehicle over and over again for the same customer throughout their lifetime.
The hidden danger is in the subtle propaganda of suggested talking points from industry that subtly moves the conversation over decades. Propaganda isn’t to tell us what to think, it’s to frame and influence the things we talk about and give us a industry favorable set of opinion talking points to frame a conversation that benefits the status quo.
The Land Cruiser is one of the last petrol vehicles that demonstrates without a doubt that we could be building to a much higher standard for viritually the same money. It was 84k when it went off the market in 2020, and Toyotas next most expensive vehicle with half the service life was about 75k. The Land Cruiser has a 10,000 usd tax because it isn’t assembled in North America, so double the service life vehicle can be delivered at the same price as the top end vehicle in a lineup. Its simply a choice by car companies not to do it.
But all we as a society can talk about is gas mileage, because that’s something the “industry can get behind.”
> There’s a profound amount of environmental impact beyond the gas pump, and most of it comes from building and shipping all the parts to assemble the automobile over and over again. The manufacturing process is profoundly environmentally destructive, so vehicles that have a longer service life (Land Cruiser is 2-2.5 times the average) have a role to play.
This isn't really true. The manufacturing is intensive but not nearly as intensive as setting fire to 1/4 gallon of gas every mile.
This impact is also significantly lower for gas cars than electric, which achieve parity around 15,000 driven miles.
There is an obvious inherent trade-off of a longer service life: you don't get efficiency improvements for 25 years.
[edit] Studies show an average gas car produces about 5.6t of CO2e in manufacture, an electric car about 8.8t of CO2e. For the gasoline car that's equivalent to burning ~600 gallons of gasoline and for the electric, ~1000 gallons.
An average car is driven 12500mi per year, and look if you're getting 10mpg, that's 6 months. How about the other 24 years 6 months? Buying a car that's 10% more efficient breaks even after what, a couple of years? [1]
If you care about the environment, take a train. Caltrain gets 100 passenger-miles per gallon average on their diesel engines and those train cars are older than I am. Once they move to electric, it should be 250-ish pax-mi/gal-equivalent based on Bart. Although I suspect probably a lot more due to the longer runs between stations.
Regarding trains, I don't think that's really accurate. Yes, a train that's completely full gets excellent effective mileage per passenger for that trip. But how often are they anywhere near full? In reality, trains and buses have to make a huge number of runs either completely or virtually empty in order to have a regular enough schedule for anybody to be willing to depend on them. We need to know the effective fuel consumption of all runs actually made per total actual passenger-miles transported over the course of at least a week, maybe more like a month.
And that's before we account for any additional trips needed for personnel movements, car and track servicing, and other such things.
Those numbers are from Bart and Caltrain's operating reports.
The Bart number may have been during peak only so fair point there, I can certainly look for the systemwide average. [1]
The Caltrain number is average over FY2016-2018, from their sustainability report page 5. [2] They completed roughly 436M passenger-miles per year, and consumed roughly 4.4M gallons of diesel. Clocks in around 100 passenger-miles per gallon. I'm sure its worse now with the COVID numbers. I think it's a fair ballpark point of comparison though, and you can consider the Bart number an upper limit.
You're of course right its a function of ridership. An average freight train gets over 400 miles per gallon per ton of cargo.
Presumably that car goes to someone else who will use it rather than being scrapped (a la Cash-for-Clunkers), right?
I've argued* that, because we drive our second car so little per year, that it makes more sense for us to buy an inexpensive, relatively gas-guzzling used car rather than a more economical hybrid. Reasoning being that someone is going to drive the gas guzzler and someone is going to drive that hybrid and better the hybrid go to someone driving a typical amount and we drive the worse one only 2-3K miles/year.
* - so far unsuccessfully, but the crazy used car market has made that moot for now.
Reasonable logic, but I feel that a moderately priced small/medium electric car would be ideal for the day-to-day short trips around town that is most of our driving these days. Unfortunately such cars don't exist yet in my market and there is not yet a significant used market for electric cars.
I completely agree!
Because I only use my car for long trips (1h or more) a couple times a month. I got a 25 years old executive sedan... Sure 21 MPG is bad, but no new cars was made for my needs. And I stay under 3 metric tons of CO2 per year.
This could be true, but isn't the whole story. Cars tend to be sold more and more as they age, for lower and lower prices. In fact, where I live (Honduras), many of the vehicles were "totaled" in the US, sold as salvage in the US, then imported to Honduras and fixed. My daily driver is an SUV that was a salvage title from Wisconsin. It has a little over 150,000 miles on it and I'm pretty sure my mechanic can keep it running over 200,000.
Would depend on the size of the engine I'd think. Old SUVs are going to have big engines and eat gas. My '78 Scout II had a 345 (5.6L?) v8 and did 12 mpg when it was running well. But if you get a smaller car with a smaller engine, you can get better mileage. My wife's '86 Civic doesn't fit the no engine electronics ideal (and it did have electronics problems that required replacing the engine control module (module sourced from a junkyard worked fine though)), but it did around 40 mpg in normal driving, 60 for cross country highway driving with A/C off. No modern safety equipment isn't great if you get in an accident, but curb weight is a lot less.
If you get an early Civic or VW Bug, you're going to get pretty good mileage as long as the engine is well adjusted.
The issue with smaller vehicles, if you do actually go off-road or tow things, is they get destroyed in short order with very few exceptions.
I ended up having to get a proper truck because I kept breaking suspension components in my Forester shrug.
And for all the climate sin folks, it’s to manage 90 acres of previously overgrown timberland which was a huge fire danger and would have gone up in smoke in short order otherwise.
It’s now happily sitting there sequestering far more carbon than the truck will ever release.
This is the achilles heel of the FJ80 we get in the US with a gas engine.
The official EPA rating on my 1995 is 12MPG city, and 14MPG highway. Real world, I'm more often in the 10-12 MPG range. If you add heavy offroad accessories, expect that to drop further.
The Diesel engine you can get in other parts of the world can get 20+ MPG in the same vehicle.
I get around 12.5 l/100 km (19 mpg?) if I got easy on the throttle, and around 18L/100 km (13 mpg) on a rough road. There is no feedback loop since it uses on carb, so as long as I keep the throttle steady it isn't that bad. Of course it can't compare with modern SUVs but not too terrible either.
Economically wise, a 2 years old mid sized SUV here costs around 40000 USD, meanwhile I bought my FZJ80 with 6000 USD (with 200000 km on the ODO). Even if I drive 1000 km a month it will take me more than 30 years of driving to start losing money compare to buying a modern one.
Having one of those, from England and not Japan, they are less bad for the environment than one might think. You just don't drive them as much, gas milleage takes care of that. Being classics, you don't drive in winter with salt on the road. And you keep them on the road far longer than they were intended, no new car is a net positive.
Well obviously the less you use a car the less environmental damage it does, but if you're not driving it half the year then it's probably not displacing a new car purchase.
What I love about the “movement” (just like in CAlifornian Politics!) is that everyone is terrible if they try to actually do anything useful, but everyone is great if they do random stuff that wastes time and effort without accomplishing it’s stated goals - as long as it seems futurist and green.
It’s basically the now is unacceptable, and the future is impossible.
I have an 80 as well (1997 LX450) and another positive aspect of owning it is that when maintenance items become due, a lot of them can be fun[1] and enjoyable to tackle, and very very rarely will you run into an issue that doesn't have threads and discussions talking about the best ways to fix it. One downside to that is that you normally have to do a little bit of legwork to filter out the noise caused by other owners also looking for how to solve that particular issue.
Starter replacement on my strait-six LX450 took ~1 hr. Pull the wheel and you're practically looking at the unit. OTOH the Birfield Joints are kind of like prehistoric CV joints and have to be rebuilt in-situ. I love mine, 400k+ miles, still going strong and slurping fuel at 14 mpg.
mine had a leaky rear main seal. That was not a fun job. Fortunatly, my brother is an experienced auto mechanic (with ~$50k of SnapOn tools). So we were able to get it done, but there is no way I could have done it myself. The vehicle had 300k on the odometer and ran perfectly when I sold it last year for more than I paid. The reason I sold it was that the plastics had got brittle from the UV in the new mexico sun, so much of the interiod was falling apart.
I wouldn't be sure about that brake booster. They can fail spectacularly, feeding a pile of brake fluid into your intake and leaving you with a huge cloud of smoke / clogged exhaust valves and ports and no brakes.
I'm not sure how can it spill brake fluid in my vacuum line since they aren't really connected together (the booster has a push rod that connects to the master cylinder). But yes, I will get it replaced soon for my safety.
Can you give an example of this mode of failure? I've never heard of this. Ever. The worst I saw on a YT channel recently (JustRolledIn) was a booster that exploded from a backfire. But never have I heard of one failing in such a way that it sucked the fluid right out of the (sealed) master cylinder.
Now, could a master cylinder and a brake booster fail this way? I suppose if the brake booster was already failed and leaked vacuum at the booster/cylinder interface, and then the master cylinder seal at the main plunger also failed, that this could happen. But I don't see one causing the other.
1975 RHD alfa spider veloce failed on me this way. True the booster setup was stupid, placed after the master cylinder and exposed to the fluid internally.
Since then, any sign of a leak == park it and take the bus.
Ah, so it was a specific failure along with a specifically bad design. THAT I get. I'm thinking of the Toyota's, Fords, Chevy's, Nissans, Mitsubishi, Internationals, Chryslers that I've owned. You know, mostly non-terrible cars :D
Oh, the spider was not a terrible car. Some interesting engineering choices for the RHD Alfas to cope with the dual carbs getting in the way of the brake booster should go meant they either had the crazy remote dual boosters, or a hideous metal bracket that ran the width of the firewall (Alfetta, 75 etc).
Other than that, the first spider I had was a wonderful thing. Plenty of performance, dynamic handling, looked gorgeous. The 2nd one was a complete sh*tbox because it was allowed to rust and never fixed properly or drove properly.
Chryslers have a bad reputation in Australia. Poor quality control, bad reliability (compared to Toyota), hard to get parts, interiors that eat themselves etc. I should know having owned a few (and rebuilding a 300C at the moment). Once they bought AMC all the terrible Chrysler problems seemed to be like a virus on Jeeps.
These are all genuine and critical problems, but the solution can really only come from governments and industry, with more emphasis on public transport, better city design and industry getting greener.
We can praise those who organise their lives in such ways as to not be too much of a burden on the planet but I don’t believe it’s effective to shame those that don’t, or do it in different ways than you expect.
It is effective to put pressure on governments and industry though.
Several of my friends were targeted by these scammers, and one of them even lost 10000 USD (a big sum in Vietnam) to a fake prosecutor. They even cloned the website of the Ministry of Public Security to scam him. Out of curiousity I took a look at their website source code, found an url to some kinds of a gateway for scammer where they have tools for scamming people, and also an android app that aid them. After finding that the whole operation is based abroad I told my friend that there is zero chance he will get his money back.
Instant noodle gives me pretty bad reactive hypoglycemia so I avoid it as much as possible. And when I have to eat one, often after coming home at night after a long trip, I often eat it with a eggs, a lot of frozen vegetables or wakame. That seems to fix the low sugar blood problem afterward.
It's not entirely true. Some banks only issue credit cards if you receive salary via their bank account or have a deposit there (mostly state owned banks) but other have no such requirement. Also they already have a credit score database up and running (CIC).
And let's not forget Singapore's strategic location in the center of world's busiest shipping lane too. That's why Singapore is strongly against the construction or Kra canal, which could shorten the route by ~1200 km bypassing Malacca straight:
Whilst it depends a bit which ships you count- the world’s busiest shipping lane is generally regarded to be the Straits of Dover with about 400 commercial transits per day. [1]
Not many people will believe that a poor country like Vietnam, led by a single party in authoritarian style, can suppress Covid-19 with zero deaths. But for people who live here, being able to travel freely is the greatest proof that the approach worked.
(still I find it weird that covid-19 seems to be much weaker in South East Asia, even Laos or Cambodia aren't being hit that hard).
Not weird at all, is an autochtonous organism in Asia, therefore they had chances to being exposed in the past to similar viruses, and they have lots of young population probably also.
Has happened before with american natives dying in mass from new european diseases, for example
