#auto news uk

[reasonsforhope]

[In February, 2023], a small warehouse in the English city of Nottingham received the crucial final components for a project that leverages the power of used EV batteries to create a new kind of circular economy.

Inside, city authorities have installed 40 two-way electric vehicle chargers that are connected to solar panels and a pioneering battery energy storage system, which will together power a number of on-site facilities and a fleet of 200 municipal vehicles while simultaneously helping to decarbonize the UK’s electrical grid.

Each day Nottingham will send a combination of solar-generated energy — and whatever is left in the vehicles after the day’s use — from its storage devices into the national grid.  The so-called “vehicle to grid” chargers deliver this energy just when it’s needed most, during peak evening demand, when people are home cooking, using hot water or watching TV. Later, the same chargers pull energy from the grid to recharge the vehicles in the wee hours of the night, when folks are sleeping and electricity is cheaper and plentiful.

“We are trying to create a virtual power station,” says Steve Cornes, Nottingham City Council’s Technical Lead. “The solar power and battery storage will help us operate independently and outside of peak times, making our system more resilient and reducing stress on the national grid. We could even make a profit.” ...

After around a decade, an EV battery no longer provides sufficient performance for car journeys. However, they still can retain up to 80 percent of their original capacity, and with this great remaining power comes great reusability.

“As the batteries degrade, they lose their usefulness for vehicles,” says Matthew Lumsden, chairman of Connected Energy. “But batteries can be used for so many other things, and to not do so results in waste and more mining of natural resources.”

The E-STOR hubs come in the form of 20-foot modular containers, each one packed with 24 repurposed EV batteries from Renault cars. Each hub can provide up to 300kW of power, enough to provide energy to dozens of homes. One study by Lancaster University, commissioned by Connected Energy, calculated that a second life battery system saved 450 tons of CO2 per MWh over its lifetime...

Battery repurposing and recycling is set to play a massive role over the coming years as the automobile industry attempts to decarbonize and the world more broadly attempts to fight waste. The production of EVs, which use lithium-ion batteries, is accelerating. Tesla, for example, is aiming to sell 20 million EVs per year by 2030 — more than 13 times the current level. In turn, 12 million tons of EV batteries could become available for reuse by 2030, according to one estimate.

“Over the next decade we are going to see this gigantic wave,” says Jessica Dunn, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Companies are recognizing this is a necessary industry. They need to ramp up infrastructure for recycling and reuse.”

-via Reasons to Be Cheerful, March 13, 2023

[mediazone786]

Pushpa 2 (Hindi) Box Office: Enters Rs. 600 Crore Club in just 13 days, sets a HUGE TARGET of Rs. 800 crores

See More

[chainreactionpodcast]

In the News: Fashion Industry's Battle with Returns, US Economic Trends, and Key Automotive Recalls

In the latest episode of our podcast, we delve into some of the most pressing issues affecting various industries today. From the fashion industry’s battle against high return rates to the shifting economic trends in the US and significant automotive recalls, we cover it all. Let’s explore these topics in greater detail. Ever wondered how the fashion industry is managing the challenges posed by…

[britsyankswheels24]

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[manualwheel]

2023 Audi TT Final Edition

[ferlucix2004]

Ansiedad

Sal de mi cabeza que no puedo concentrarme ¡Déjame respirar! ¡Ya me falta el aire! deja mis noches en paz. Eres un tormento del que no me puedo safar, deja de meter ideas en mi cabeza solo por querer lastimarme, déjame entrar a la tranquilidad ¡Apártate! ¡Déjame! ¡Déjame!.

¡Suéltame! ¡Suéltame! (...) Quisiera poder algún día amarme ¡Apártate! Haces mis días cortos y mis noches largas, solo escucho tu voz; aunque es tan suave amenaza, salte de mi cabeza. ¿Es un tipo de venganza? Tan mala he sido para que vengas a mi casa.

¿Es una amenaza? ¿Es una amenaza? Suéltame de una vez por todas maldito tormento que no me deja en paz, quiero tranquilidad... Alejate de una vez más o me voy a suicidar.

Suéltame ansiedad.

[notaplaceofhonour]

Incredibly interesting how the anti-Zionists in my mentions can’t seem to criticize Zionism without Holocaust Revisionism & pogrom denialism, when even just a cursory glance at early Zionist writing shows how thoroughly they saw national independence as a means of self-defense against antisemitic violence that was widespread long before the Holocaust. Don’t take my word for it; read for yourself:

“Auto-Emancipation”, Leon Pinsker, 1882:

The events of the last few years in enlightened Germany, in Roumania, in Hungary, and especially in Russia, have effected what the far bloodiest persecutions of the Middle Ages could not. The national consciousness which until then had lain dormant in sterile martyrdom awoke the masses of the Russian and Roumanian Jews and took form in an irresistible movement toward Palestine. Mistaken as this movement has proved to be by its results, it was, nevertheless, a right instinct to strike out for home.

BILU Manifesto, 1882:

“If I do not help myself, who will help me?” Nearly two thousand years have passed since, in an evil hour, after an heroic struggle, the glory of our Temple vanished in fire and our kings and chieftains exchanged their crowns and diadems for the chains of exile. We lost our country where our beloved ancestors had lived. Into the Exile we took with us, of all our glories, only a spark of the fire by which our Temple, the abode of the Great One, was engirdled, and this little spark kept us alive while the towers of our enemies crumbled into dust, and this spark leapt into the celestial flame and illuminated the heroes of our race and inspired them to endure the horrors of the dance of death and the tortures of the autos-da fe. And this spark is again kindling and will shine for us, a true pillar of fire going before us on the road to Zion, while behind us is a pillar of cloud, the pillar of oppression threatening to destroy us. Are you asleep, O our nation? What have you been doing until 1882? Sleeping and dreaming the false dream of assimilation. Now thank God, you have awaked from your slothful slumber. The pogroms have awakened you from your charmed sleep. Your eyes are open to recognize the obscure and delusive hopes.

“The Jewish State”, Theodor Herzl, 1896:

No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Wherever they live in perceptible numbers, they are more or less persecuted. Their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter. They are debarred from filling even moderately high positions, either in the army, or in any public or private capacity. And attempts are made to thrust them out of business also: "Don't buy from Jews!" Attacks in Parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys--for example, their exclusion from certain hotels--even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous. The forms of persecution varying according to the countries and social circles in which they occur. In Russia, imposts are levied on Jewish villages; in Rumania, a few persons are put to death; in Germany, they get a good beating occasionally; in Austria, Antisemites exercise terrorism over all public life; in Algeria, there are traveling agitators; in Paris, the Jews are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. Shades of anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable.

Address at the First Zionist Congress, Max Nordau, 1897:

To Jewish distress no-one can remain indifferent, neither Christian nor Jew. It is a great sin to let a race to whom even their worst enemies do not deny ability, degenerate in intellectual and physical distress. It is a sin against them and against the work of civilization, in the interest of which Jews have not been useless co-workers. That Jewish distress cries for help. To find that help will be the great work of this Congress.

Address at the Sixth Zionist Congress, Max Nordau, 1903:

From the very beginning we boldly and distinctly said, "We are not contented; we regard our situation as a very bad one; we consider our treatment as discreditable and undeserved; we regard a fundamental change in our situation as a vital necessity; after the humiliating attempts we have made at assimilation with other peoples we have taken counsel with ourselves and we desire to live in our own way, in our own right, on our own soil."

Additionally, in the same year Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus (the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, that the quote “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses longing to breathe free” comes from), 1883, she also wrote The Jewish Problem and the final letters of An Epistle to the Hebrews, both of which called for the establishment of a Jewish state & emigration to Palestine to protect Eastern European Jews from the antisemitism they were facing.

TL;DR – The above quotes weren’t the first time Jews suggested national self-determination as a response to anti-Jewish violence—and certainly not the first to discuss a return to Zion—but they were from more than SIXTY YEARS before the end of the Holocaust. And not only does every single one of these quotes come from before the end of WWII, before the Holocaust, & before the Nazi party was even founded, but the latest of these quotes was an entire decade-and-a-half before the British were even in Palestine.

TL;DR TL;DR – To whatever extent guilt over the Holocaust motivated European goyim to finally aid Jews in their national project, Jews had been proposing a Jewish state to defend against antisemitism for a very very long time. To suggest otherwise is complete revisionist history.

It’s maddening to find out that the scholar who first developed the idea that “Zionism is Settler Colonialism”, Fayez Sayegh, was a member of the Syrian Nazi Party during and immediately after the Holocaust, was an active participant in the Red Scare, using it to demonize Israel as a manifestation of a Global Communist Threat™️ through the height of the Cold War (true to his Nazi roots, accusing Israel of Judeo-Bolshevism) before switching to a Colonialism narrative when Post-Colonialism came in vogue in the 60s. And yet, the people I hear parroting the talking points of this anti-Communist, Ultranationalist Fascist-turned-scholar are the people who are constantly talking about how Liberal Progressives aren’t Communist enough and actually enemies because “Liberals will always side with Fascists”. Maddening.

If you’ve ever noticed how the “Zionism = Settler Colonialism” narrative eerily shares the core components of the far right’s Replacement Theory (that there are 1. Jews 2. conspiring to invade a given place and 3. replace the population with Jews), this is why; it’s because the idea that Zionism is Settler Colonialism came from a literal Nazi.

It is very literally Nazi propaganda.

[leaujongyongnews]

Brighton bookkeeper stole £1m to fund Belize property empire

A trusted book-keeper stole more than £1 million from her employer to fund a property empire, including a luxury home in Belize she planned to retire to.

Louise Gow, 64, diverted up to £200,000 a year from Smuggler, an award-winning video production company – simply by putting her own bank account details on the invoices she was paid to process.

As colleagues were being laid off or asked to take pay cuts during the pandemic, she increased the amount she diverted into her own pocket.

When confronted – via a videocall as she visited Belize – she admitted stealing a couple of hundred thousand, and finally the £1,116,82.05 it was discovered she had taken over five years, blaming the menopause.

Now, after being jailed for 44 months last week, she is beginning her retirement behind bars.

At a hearing at Lewes Crown Court last Wednesday, Judge Mark van der Zwart said: “Your thefts have enabled you to build what seems to have been a substantial portfolio of homes, including a large luxury home you planned to retire to in Belize.

“During the covid era when valued members of staff were laid off and everybody in the company took a pay cut, your helping yourself to the company funds seems to have increased.

“You seem to have been surprised when the managing director Fergus Brown made a report to the police. You were planning on continuing to steal for longer until you had taken enough.

“You returned to the UK when you could have stayed in that country and contests attempts to extradite you.

“You sought to blame the menopause and to reframe your actions as a way of providing employment to people in poorer parts of the world.

“The menopause can provide an explanation for why peole behave in ways different to how they behaved before.

“But it cannot amount to justification for spending five years plundering the resources of your trusted employer, funnelling the proceeds into your property empire.”

In a victim impact statement read out in court, Mr Brown said Gow had been a trusted member of staff since he founded Smuggler in 2008.

He said: “She used her position of power and authority to steal large amounts of money from us and to fund a luxury lifestyle for her and her husband.

“It limited our growth. We lost a material amount of money that would have been used to grow our company.

“Her assistant took the theft very badly. She thought they were friends. It has affected her trust. She was very hurt by the situation and has no one to speak to about what has happened.”

Prosecuting, Rio Pahlavanpour said her deception began to unravel on 29 April 2021, when Barclays contacted Mr Brown saying someone was trying to transfer money to Smuggler Ltd was using the wrong account number.

Gow initially tried to explain it away as an innocent mistake, but then Barclays found more and more examples. Gow was eventually charged with fraud by abuse of position between July 2016 and May 2021.

Mr Pahlavanpour said the Crown would not be making an application under the Proceeds of Crime Act as a civil case was in progress to recover the funds.

Defending, Caroline Stewart said: “There was an intention to put it all back but she was never able to do that. when it was brought up she did admit responsibility.

“She was in Belize, in a remote meeting when that admission was made and she returned to this country knowing that there would be some serious consequences.”

She added: “She doesn’t understand how she could have done something so stupid and self destructive.

“She has thrown away her longstanding career, her marriage – she’s now divorced. The esteem those who knew her held her in, her career – it’s all gone.”

Gow, who now lives in St Albans, was declared bankrupt in February. A receiver has now been appointed in the civil case to recover funds.

[united-kingdom-news]

Carabao Cup semis set, Southampton close in on Juric, plus team news: Read More

[naukrisambad]

Top 7 best car insurance Renewal companies in 2024

Top car insurance Renewal companies: In this guide, we unveil the top car insurance renewal companies that stand out for their reliability, customer service, and commitment to providing comprehensive protection for your vehicle. 7 Best car insurance Renewal companies Selecting the right car insurance renewal company is crucial for securing optimal coverage and peace of mind on the road. As you…

[mediazone786]

Rebel Ridge

A former Marine grapples his way through a web of small-town corruption when an attempt to post bail for his cousin escalates into a violent standoff with the local police chief.

[wastelandbabyblue]

What happened???

joe k was supposed to go to a con in uk tomorrow and he cancelled like 3 hours ago. a bunch of people flew in from the US and other places just to see him and it's shitty af. also the video he filmed to apologize was very meh because he was like driving and barely looked at the camera. like dude you couldn't stop for 30 seconds to film that bffr

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Mazda V705, 1985, by IAD. International Automotive Design of Worthing, England, were commissioned to produce a prototype for a new Mazda sports car that had first been suggested to Mazda in 1976. The go-ahead for the project had been granted in 1982 with the concept development being turned into a competition between the Mazda design teams in Tokyo and California. The US proposal for a front engine/rear drive roadster in the British tradition won and it was a UK company who were chosen to take the project to the next stage. The V705 had a fibreglass body and 1.4 litre engine from a Mazda Familia and was shipped to California for market testing. Overwhelming positive reactions saw the project get final approval on January 19, 1986. Development was then moved to Japan with the first generation NA series MX-5 Miata being unveiled at the Chicago Auto Show on February 10, 1989

[manualwheel]

Jaguar

[race-week]

F1 Sources

I’ve been asked a few times about what F1 sources I deem as being reliable and here’s a mostly conclusive list

Some of these are particularly reliable for news about certain teams/drivers, and some are all rounders

Magazines/Media Outlets

- AMuS (Auto Motor und Sport), German Motorsport publication, personally my holy grail. Very good for reports on technical stuff.

- Canal+, reliable particularly for Alpine related stuff

- Sky Sports UK, typically don’t comment on rumours until they’re essentially confirmed but sometimes say the wildest shit with no real bearing

- Sky Italia, reliable about Ferrari

- Autosport

- Motorsport.com

People

- Chris Medland, honestly my favourite journalist, he won’t report on anything until it’s verified. Very handy during race weekends

- Giuliano Duchessa, great technical information and also really good for Ferrari news

- Tobi Grüner, AMuS journalist. Does tech stuff but also paddock news

- Albert Fabrega, credible Spanish journalist. Good technical source, especially for upgrades

- Craig Scarborough, excellent technical source

- Andrew Benson, BBC journalist pretty decent information

- Jolyon Palmer, very good technical information (but be aware he is employed by FOM so some things that he says may be influenced by that)

- Erik van Haren, this one is so-so in my opinion. Usually has very accurate news about Red Bull/Verstappen but also has occasionally been used in the past as a mouthpiece of sorts

Less reliable sources (imo)

- ESPN, a bit of a FOM mouthpiece (compared to other sources)

- Lawrence Barretto, FOM employee typically says/writes what they want

- Will Buxton, FOM employee typically says/writes what they want

- Joe Saward, used to be somewhat reliable but recently talks a lot of nonsense

- The Race, sometimes can have good information (particularly things written by Mark Hughes) but a lot is clickbait nonsense

[tanadrin]

Imagine one day a new social trend starts spreading. It’s something unbelievably dumb. Not harmful per de, but truly silly to believe. Let’s say, I dunno, healing crystals start going mainstream. Everybody’s talking about their crystals. It becomes impolite to criticize people who believe in healing crystals. They become a big part of people’s personalities, and people on TV start talking about them, and one day years down the line politicians are debating funding for crystal-based medicine. And through it all you are sitting there going, what the fuck is happening. I thought we were all on the same page on this. You want to get along and be friendly and open minded but you cannot pretend to believe in healing crystals, this is nonsense, and when the topic comes up you refuse to lie about it. This eventually starts to have social consequences—they’re that popular!—but what can you do? You cannot pretend a lump of quartz can cure the flu or whatever. It’s just all so unbearably embarrassing.

I think what the centrist/liberal/center-left reactionary turn driven by culture war stuff feels like. And I think the key emotion is probably cringe. Not hate, not fear, though those emotions may reinforce the turn. I think in a lot of cases people who imagine themselves pretty open minded and flexible have as part of their worldview something they thought was bedrock social consensus—on the level of “healing crystals are silly woo”—so bedrock maybe that it didn’t even need to be a conceptual boundary they actually policed in their minds.

For instance, when she started her anti-trans turn, JK Rowling made a big show of not being really anti trans, just arguing that Some People Had Gone Too Far. She wasn’t a frothing religious reactionary, after all. And I believe that’s probably true! I think Rowling probably did have a mental model of sex and gender with a little bit of give in it—of the “we can humor the odd weirdo” type. But as the discussion of trans rights in the UK got more serious over her lifetime, trans people went from “the odd weirdo” to “a recognized minority,” and eventually this ran against a bedrock belief that on some level men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet. To act otherwise was just too embarrassing. And she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in the name of political correctness.

Other people whose brains have been eaten by the anti-woke mind virus (as @eightyonekilograms calls it) have something going of the contrarian in them, who enjoys yelling “up yours, woke moralists!” or w/e. Im thinking of ppl like Glenn Greenwald here, or Dave Chapelle, people who seem not to feel alive except when people are mad at them. That’s a separate but interesting dynamic. And there are people like Graham Linehan who become totally unhinged through this process of auto-radicalization, moths drawn ever closer to a particular source of validation within their chosen reactionary subcommunity, until they are truly parodies of themselves. That is also an important dynamic, but it’s one that only takes hold after the initial turn has begun.

I think the role of that feeling of cringe, that refusal to entertain an idea because it is too embarrassing (even if it does actually have a decent body of research behind it, unlike crystals) is important to think about, because I am interested in how to get people over it. I know that feeling has affected my own thinking over my lifetime. I wasn’t raised particularly conservative, but I had to learn not to cringe at a lot of feminist thought before I could appreciate it and learn from it. I explicitly didn’t have that cringe when it came to gay people for whatever reason, so it never entered my mind that it might be a problem. I remember being surprised to learn when I was very young that some boys wanted to marry other boys, but my response was “huh. Go figure.” Because for whatever reason I had not picked up that this was something I was supposed to be grossed out by. A general doctrine of empathy, of trying to understand people on their own terms, can help forestall some of this stuff, but it’s not foolproof in either direction—I don’t want to believe crystals have healing powers if it becomes socially popular to do so, just because it is socially popular to do so! And if they do, I don’t want to not believe they do just because it is socially unpopular!

(Obviously the crystals thing is not a one to one metaphor for the trans thing, so don’t read too much into that. Maybe astrology would have been a better analogy. Also I’m not talking just about people whose reactionary turn is predicated on trans issues—I think this dynamic applies to everything from gay rights to the Tridentine Mass. But trans issues are a handy example bc, as the adage goes, somebody posts once about trans people and they never post anything normal again. I think the classic rapid-onset trans derangement syndrome is closely tied to the fact that gender norms are a really deep element of many people’s social-consensus-based worldview, and so challenged to that worldview are felt as really cringe.)

I’m curious if other people who grew more liberal in their thinking over time had a similar experience of having to overcome what was basically a feeling of embarrassment at certain ideas.