Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- Boxing Day, 2019

It seems not a whole lot is not mentioned at least once on the blog. LOL.

Garum.

A couple of days ago I'm reading one of those articles used as clickbait: archaeologist solve Roman Empire mystery with 500 letters discovered near Hadrian's Wall, from  The [London] Express. 

[NOTE: if you click on that link it will slow down your computer.]“

Among the meany treasures, archaeologists have uncovered around 500 letters sent to and from Roman troops based at the fort [along Hadrian's Wall].

“Many contain requests for favourite foods from back home, the find reveals that, even here, soldiers were being sent a variety of goods from their home countries.

“Among the most sought after products was garum.” At the time of their discovery, the tablets were the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain.

Garum. I've mentioned it at least twice on the blog.

Garum: fermented fish sauce, much like we use soy sauce or ponzu sauce.

Japanese sauces.

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California Bans Per-Minute Billing

This will be an interesting story to follow. Link here.

On December 16, 2019, California’s Office of Administrative Law approved amendments to its Electric Vehicle Fueling Systems Specifications. Effective January 1, 2020, these new rules ban operators of electric vehicle charging stations from billing by the minute.

This is a huge blow to Electrify America and EVgo.

Both firms bill by the minute for EV charging, leaving drivers with sticker shock and feeling ripped off by the end of the session. Chargepoint will also be negatively affected, as many of their site-host partners choose to bill per minute.

And while Tesla already bills by the kilowatt-hour, California will also be requiring charging stations to physically display “on their face” important information about electricity cost and delivery, a move that will put the most burden on Tesla’s Supercharger stations.

In the lead-up to the rule, charging network operators repeated their usual arguments about “selling a service” versus selling electricity, but California wasn’t having any of it:

The Department acknowledges this group of comments and disagrees with the interpretation of the primary commodity being traded. As defined in BPC § 13400(a)(4) and (p), electricity is considered a type of motor vehicle fuel.

NIST Handbook 44 makes clear what the unit of measure of electricity as motor vehicle fuel dispensed from EVSE shall be measured by — either the kWh or the megajoule (MJ).

The Department concludes that the primary commodity delivered by EVSE is electricity, not parking space accessibility, parking space rental time, or accessibility to the EVSE itself. The Department considers those as “other services” of the transaction.

The Department clarifies that time is not an acceptable unit of measure for dispensing and billing electricity as motor vehicle fuel.