Shrinkflation

You may not have noticed it (but I suspect you have) that one of the ways of increasing the price of something is to give you less of it for the same price. Its been around for decades now and has acquired the (I thought well known) name of Shrinkflation. I recently bought some Tiramisu which comes in a glass "cup" again because I end up using the cups as drinking glasses. However when I picked them up in the supermarket I felt the cup was smaller ... it was, but cunningly smaller than I'd expected.

Below is a pair of pictures showing the new cup beside the old cup. The red marker shows where the smaller cup water level is and how that shapes up against the older one.

Then when I tipped that into the older cup its a lot less than half. The shape based on the sloped sides means that while the cup is just a bit smaller to look at, its less than half of what the older coup contained.

Cute.

SR500 clutch cable sizes and standards

Recently my SR500 needed a new clutch cable:

So as this bike was a stock Japan Spec 1986 model I thought it would be straightforward to order a new part. I went to Yamaha (first mistake) and they confidently identified it and sourced a part for me from a local dealer with old stock.

It arrived and was too long. So I measured it and measured the old one from end to end of the sheath (which is what actually matters). I won't actually give that measurement and you'll see why soon. Below is the cable I had on the bike from purchase (used, and a Japanese import).

(Fig 1)

My measurement proved sort of worthless because nobody (and I mean nobody) knows the lengths of the cables they sell; they only talk in short, standard or long. 

You are fucking kidding me right?

So which cable do I have as my starting cable which was perfect then the Yamaha one was clearly too long ... Hmmm ... its fucking irritating when people in engineering and technical roles speak in qualitative language not quantitative language. You know, like "how many do you want" ... a few. Gives them five ... ahh, no mate I'll need a lot more than that.

Knowing nothing I had to make some assumptions ... what sizes did I now have? So I took a punt and ordered the short from someone else.

So now with two new cables I know that Yamaha supplied me the "long" and someone else supplied the short and my original cable was the fucking standard cable.

FUCK ME DEAD

So you can see from te above tape measure that there is about 100mm between each of them. Giving us

•  +100
• standard
• -100

This means that if (refer to Fig 1 above) we measure from the end of the plain steel cap to the end of the black end (that fits into the engine) the entire length is 960mm. You can now use that as a reference number for determining what you have because that's apparently "standard".

So now you know.

Shed batteries

Well after some time I've decided that the FLA (flooded lead acid) batteries I put into the shed are past their use by date. Not bad really as they were installed new in 2022, which is about 4 years ago.

I'm presently running a pair of donated 24V LiFePO4 batteries that a mate bought (believing the Temu ad) in parallel.

you can see that the foot-print of the pair of 24V's is about half what the pair of 12V's was but they had a RC of 95 (meaning that the battery would survive for 95 minutes under a constant 25amp load before 10.5V is hit ... optimistic if you ask me) 

I've never been really satisfied with how the recharge after discarges (probably due to the internal resistance of FLA). See this post for my analysis back then. 

This is one ofthe tiddlers ... rated at 200Ah

talk about optimism ... I pulled one apart and the Cells were 7Ah and there wasn't anywhere near enough of them. Further, the BMS was clamped at 9Amps.

Well that's 400W or so, so it'll do for now ... I'll post again when the new cells arive

Exonomics

I looked, I couldn't find this word, so I'm making it up

Exonomics: the study of everything that isn't economic or the use of bullshit theory to use "voodoo economics" to cheat you out of what's yours.

So, good old "Trickle Down" Economics is a good example of Exonomics

It could include:

External economics: the study of how outside factors (environmental, social, political systems) influence economic behavior, or how economic activity affects external systems.

Economics of the external: the economics of things outside traditional markets (like natural resources, social relationships, or intangible goods)

Economics of externalities: specifically on anything that's external (like carbon dioxide release from burning fossile fuels, external costs or benefits not reflected in market prices (like pollution or innovation spillovers)

Of course working out how to cost this in the corporate world is a known vexed problem.