We should defederate with any server that has less than 7 degrees of separation with Meta. We can call it the Kevin Bacon rule.
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To be fair e-axles are actually a thing. You can mount the electric motor where an engine would be and use largely the same components as a traditional car to get the motion to the wheels. Instead e-axles basically wrap all the motion components around the axle. Motor trend had an article about it a while ago.
www.motortrend.com/news/e-axle-vs-central-drive-motor-layout-commercial-evs
I would love to see chargers more incentivized at workplaces. As solar becomes more common charging during the day is going to make more sense than night. There are already ways to track charging costs and bill them out or just consider it a job perk. Most people don't need to charge 300 miles a day so even if every single employee drives an EV you probably only need to install enough chargers for somewhere like ¼ of the cars on site. Yes some people need to drive for work, but there are a lot of cars that sit all day and could be running on solar instead of charging off something else at night instead.
This seems to largely be a "retelling" of an original story from NPR from 2021. The original has significantly more information from actually interviewing the owner of the project.
The original story from NPR says that they're able to drive their tractor between the panels. It's interesting that the project could essentially be described as an end run around a historic designation though. They put 1.2 MW of solar up, and from reading between the lines it seems that's how they're making money, the farming seems to be much more of a side thing that they're required to do for historic reasons.
Not an expert, but my gut reaction is not really. The panels themselves are largely glass, aluminum and silicon, with fairly small amounts of doping agents. There are electronics but since they're outside they're largely encased in something, wiring which would be plastic and copper or possibly aluminum, and then the structure itself which is going to be steel and concrete.
Solar panels are significantly more sturdy than one would think given they are essentially a giant piece of glass. They're usually rated to 12mm hail or more, which would normally absolutely devastate a crop. They don't really go bad either they just become less efficient over time. There's no moving parts to wear, no liquids, and in some designs very little in the way of electronics to go bad.
Essentially, I wouldn't be surprised if there would be more harmful contamination from a diesel tractor driving around in the field or from a nearby coal power plant than from any kind of solar array as long as it didn't have like, lead legs or something.
That being said, these kind of projects have been shown a lot but they're unlikely to be used in most large scale farming - they usually interfere with any machines used to plant or harvest, and are only really well suited to a few crops. Parking lots are a much easier target for this type of solar project.
Windows phone. Originally Microsoft put out a number of apps as web wrappers, but the mobile YouTube site kind of awful. So Microsoft wrote a YouTube app of their own that was actually kind of great and allowed you to download videos and play audio in the background and basically actually work right. Google threw a fit and basically made Microsoft delete the app.
Windows central still has a bunch of articles from the time up.
https://www.windowscentral.com/search?searchTerm=Phone+YouTube