“Of the 12 apostles, 18 of them are buried in Spain.”

It’s a very controversial picture through and through, the people who made it were a bunch of edgelords.

Strong Pig in Smoke energy

That’s what you get for liking hibiscus.

By embracing an identity, corporations end up destroying it.

Ir was always cringe, but we did it anyway.

The cutout looks like Saddam Hussein.

Same mental age as him either way.

I always wondered if it’s implied that she’s ugly or that the sailor will get in trouble with the captain.

Ah, yes , the XTV, just like porn, but the one getting fucked is you!

Ah, yes, Redmond theme.

I don’t want you to download Manjaro, but I had one partition as root and another as home and Manjaro just asked me to install itself in root, to replace my previous borked Ubuntu installation and use old home without data loss, instead of making me set everything myself again, like Ubuntu does.

Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don’t, they risk just not being elected.

To be honest, USSR, for which tankies simp so much, purged the Jews, the Poles, the Armenians, the Uzbeks and pretty much anyone who wasn’t either Georgian or Russian from their government. So in a weird way, communists were fascist too.

The moving parts of the machine that come down to charge the bus were made by some Italian company, I think. And some of the electric parts that raise the power to the right amount were built by a Romanian company.

We did have capacitors arc and blow up once. Also, the charger itself arced and burned a hole in the metal where the bus parts and pantograph parts made the #-shaped contact.

Before designing electronics, the electrician in charge of the project tried to get a readymade system from ABB. They called him 9 months later to talk about it and he replied “Don’t need it anymore. We built our own.” And they were like “What do you mean, you built your own?!” 😄

WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘IT REQUIRES CLARIFICATION’?

Ah, yes the industry veterans. They had none. Most of the staff were recent university graduates. Those who weren’t included a former minister, an engineer who designed various industrial buildings, like crude oil storage tanks, and electricity engineer.

Together, they designed and built a pantograph mostly by themselves, a high power charging system that worked through the roof that charged a 50 kW battery in 6 minutes.

The rest of the specialists were mostly obscure scientists, analysts, accountants and PR people.

Since I have already leaked myself, here is a picture of the “amazing superbus” prototype: link

Which community do you think would be appropriate?

Imagine you are trying to create something new, but not completely. Suppliers for most electric bus parts exist, ZTF being chief amongst them. Did the executives enter the market with a strategy to buy everything they could, assemble it, enter the market quicker, build many units, learn how busses are built and then innovate from experienced position? Nope.

A toddler learns to crawl before learning to run. A bird learns to hop before learning to fly. Our executives started to innovate before learning to build.

Why buy or build a metal frame? Too many parts, let’s build the frame out of composite materials, only a few parts to glue together and the CEO has contacts amongst the yacht builders.

The end result drove like a tank. It had zero flexibility, was way too rigid for any passenger carrying vehicle and tended to lean to one side. Together with a bunch of windows that can’t be opened and a skylight it was a greenhouse on wheels during the summer.

Composite parts getting glued required sanding and pieces of it are still embedded into poor sod’s who did that hands.

The bus also featured a front windscreen curved too heavily for most crucibles to make one.

Can’t we just buy a dashboard? No, can’t get attached to a supplier, gotta build our own thing. The designer didn’t plan for a spot for a driver to store their coat and bag. Also, it had no place to keep money and bus tickets for those passengers who didn’t buy them earlier.

Several dashboards got designed, money dried up and the people who designed and built them left. Yup, all Fantastic Four of them, leaving a poorly documented mess for people who come after them.

I was tasked with building a telemetry system and a user information system.

Built a telemetry system with Grafana and a data collection script running in bus’es computer. Me and one other guy was the whole team.

For information system, I used Vue and Python on a Raspberry pi running cog, a very minimal WebKit browser. It had a 3D bus on an angled map and said which stops come next.

I have a similar story. A few years ago, when I was young and naïve, I worked at a startup that tried to build electric busses.

The person who planned how long each prototype construction task was going to take was the CFO, who had zero technical experience, when I tried to explain my job to her, she said “Sorry, Justas, I am just a woman, I don’t understand anything.”

Later I heard that CFO in question estimated new prototype construction to take 3 months. That seemed farfetched, so I went to the garage to talk to the assembly people and they said “3 months? We’ll be lucky if we get finished in 9!” To which she replied “They don’t know anything, I am the one in charge of the planning!”

I left shortly afterwards and was the last person to receive my salary on time. They started going into debt and I recently read an article about them going into bankruptcy. So much shit happened there I could write a book about it.