Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Many disasters before he was sacked."
One place i worked had someone like that. Unfortunately because of his incompetence noone would let him work in the field, so he'd been pushed to working on a bench and noone would let any important gear anywhere near that bench. As a result he spent most of his time reading and became a "bush lawyer", which made him even harder to deal with and nearly impossible to sack.
(remember, he was supposedly qualified and experienced) In the end we gave him equipment to work on - then someone would quietly inspect the work & report on the cockups - of which there were many - and fix it properly. Then he was given field work. I was tasked with visiting every site he'd been to half an hour after he'd left, making notes of what he'd done wrong and correcting them. In some cases the cockups extended well beyond the stuff he was supposed to be working on. Some might even call it sabotage.
Eventually he was fired, with all the supporting evidence used to fend off the inevitable unjustified dismissal case - during which the judge commented on his "creative" (but wildly incorrect) interpretations of the law.
Not long after that I resigned and moved on - and had the misfortune to run across him being a biochemistry student in the university I'd started working at. Apparently he'd already almost killed a couple of lab techs and destroyed a high speed centrifuge by not following safety instructions (not only given as a specific class before being allowed near the lab, but followed up on when using the things)
" ignoring how awkward it is to hold some concealed nut in place whilst you get the thread started "
" I think the Hayes garage must be a collection of disassembled cars."
The difference is that the Haynes Garage has 56 varieties of locktite and other things onhand and they assume that hobbyists do too.
I always tried to obtain a partsbook and workshop service manual for my vehicles along with the Haynes.
"Turns out right behind the plastic trim was the heater matrix."
One tech (qualified and should have known better) managed to to that to brake and fuel lines running under the floor on a high-end Nissan Skyline (this was the days when car kits were big and phones were the size of 3 housebricks)
The annoying part was that when handing the job over to him, I'd specifically warned him to _check_ that he wasn't going to drill through any brake lines when putting the floorplate in for the kit. The fact that it belonged to the financial director didn't help.
"is the case in every industry. I know several of the largish contracts my late father was employed on (both domestic and industrial) had him cursing under his breath that they were making stupid penny pinching decisions on the build that would come back to bite them later in terms of maintainance costs."
In such a case, explaining _why_ XYZ is a bad decision will result in the spec being changed (beancounters know nothing about what they're specifying, one classic example being the IT team who were told to stop buying hideously expensive rolls of tape and use the same stuff that everyone else did - the response being "we tried that, but it tends to gum up the backup drives")
On the other hand most contractors installers _don't_ give a shit about maintenance and unless something is specced, will use the cheapest possible items they can lay their hands on at the wholesaler regardless of longevity or suitability for the task. After all, they don't have to deal with the long term maintenance (and if they do, they get paid, so it's not in their interest to make something maintenance-free)
Larger contractors have things called "quantity surveyors" whose job is to look at what's being used where and work out where corners can be cut to reduce costs. One quantity surveyor found that a building he was tasked with was vastly overengineered and the floors would take ten times the typical loading you'd find in an office, so choppied out a lot of material.Much backslapping and hero status all around - until it was discovered that the newly built 5 floor city library had floors so weak that it could only have bookshelves on the ground and first floor and the stacks plus librarian workspaces had to be located somewhere else.
"Instituting all manner of (formal?) authorizations, access logging, and cross checking the first with the second does not scale well if it has to be done by people, especially when the reviewers may not be trustworthy."
Remote logging/auditing of _everything_ has a discouraging effect on those who might be tempted to fiddle with systems. Keylogging isn't just for bad guys.
"what's stopping it from importing solar energy from southern Europe/north Africa, wind energy from Denmark, nuclear energy from France, or hydro energy from Norway?"
Transmission losses.
You can minimise them by moving to HVDC, but you still can't go much past 1,000,000 volts without getting all kinds of corona effects along the line. You can't make the lines heavier to carry more current as that means closer spaced towers and each tower is a leakage point for your power feed. You really don't want your corona to turn into an arc with DC because you have to shutdown the entire feed to stop it (DC arcs are self-sustaining)
Underwater cables are even worse and the largest undersea connectors anywhere are only about 2GW
As for north Africa: There's a shedload of potential demand building up in the countries where it would be generated and the inhabitants won't take kindly to "new colonialists" shipping it off for consumption elsewhere.
"Here in NL the government used to subsidise offshore wind energy. But the new wind farms no longer need that subsidy for generation"
The difference between direct and indirect subsidies is only in the visibility of how it's paid.
Forcing gridcos to pay stupidly high feedin tarriffs - that's a subsidy
Forcing gridcos to take renewables energy as first choice - even when there's more generation than demand - that's a subsidy too
Forcing gridcos to eat the entire cost of having to overlay the distribution network in order to handle power flows changing direction without much notice - another subsidy
Forcing gridcos to build transmission lines to the generation point - another subsidy (normal producers have to pay for those lines themselves)
When I see renewables operators being paid the same bulk rates as other generators then I'll believe that subsides are mostly gone.
Apart from the above, some of those rules contribute to grid instability. The infamous South Australian statewide blackouts occured due to dropoffs in wind generation happening, but the weather forecasts being for a resumption in 4-6 hours - not enough time for a backup gas power station to repay its startup costs, let alone the hourly ones, before they would have been forced to turn the plant off again - so the power generator declined to fire it up and the state went dark for 6 hours.
In order to prevent repeats, SA installed Elon's battery farm, but even that isn't enough for prolonged wind outages, so agreements have been made for backup operators to be paid well enough to justify turning the plants on - but a plant that's only run for a couple of hundred hours a year still requires maintenance and effectively produces power costing dollars per kWh instead of a few cents.
All this means that renewables actually cost about 10 times what "normal" generation does - which is ok for a peak-load generation plant but utter bollocks for your economics if they're supposed to be baseline.
If you think rolling blackouts won't happen here, you're being naive. Yes, renewables can just about replace existing electricity generation, but there's no capacity left to cater to the increases coming from decarbonising transport, heating, etc. Electricity generation only accounts for 25-35% of carbon emissions and generation capacity has to be sized for peak loads, not average ones.
"The sun is always shining somewhere and the wind is always blowing somewhere."
This is true, but electricity can only be economically transported about 1500 miles at absolute most (most source-load paths are significantly less than 400miles)
Grandiose plans of paving the Sahara for solar fall down on several points:
1: It's not ours
2: there's a lot of potential demand nearby (southwards)
3: The engineering of the transmission system alone would be the largest civil engineering project ever attempted by at least an order of magnitude
4: By the point of entry into Europe, you'd lose 3/4 of the power generated due to transmission losses
"what if nuclear power stations had been targeted by Al Qaeda during 9/11 instead of the Pentagon, the WTC and the failed attack on Capitol Hill "
Not much. Even if the containment building had been breached the reactor pressure vessel inside is quite small and well protected.
'It's almost as if they were designed to withstand an airliner crashing into them from the outset.....'
"Hate to think of a plane crashing into a sodium cooled FBR and the subsequent sodium fire."
Sodium FBRs have a habit of catching fire without needing any assistance from external factors, Look at Monju. However as they don't need to be designed to cater to a steam explosion the containment buildings are much smaller and even tougher than PWR reactors.
> we still need all the conventional back up. So all you save is a small amount of relatively cheap fuel, but you still incur all the capital and O&M costs, plus the costs of the "renewables".
As carbon-emitting storage becomes steadliy more proscribed (and it will. Look at what's happening int he Laptev Sea), that backup generation will have to become nuclear - which currently doesn't load follow very well.
Moving to molten salt systems makes load following trivial, but at that point the renewables become surplus to requirements because MSR designs should produce power at ~1/4 the cost of renewables.
" the UK's new nuclear fleet will be made up at least four different hugely subsidised designs, two of which have never been built before, and the other which has never been built in Europe before. "
The existing UK nuclear fleet is uneconomic because virtually every single plant is a different design.
In any case, PWR/BWR reactors are inefficient due to low temperature input to the turbines.
"(powerwall)... costs a small fortune, and is unlikely to ever offer any ROI. Other than feeling a bit green."
The ROI is in having power when the grid goes out - which it's likely to do increasingly in the near future thanks to insufficient generation capacity (plants being shut down) _and_ rapdily increasing demand.
"Not to worry - the government gets another chance to shaft the consumers with Sizewell C"
Compared with what "renewables" producers are being paid, those nuke plants are going to be selling bargain basement priced electrickery.
Coal, oil and gas generation is going away. Renewables can match their current production but they can't meet the increases that are required to replace gas/oil heating, internal combustion engines and industrial processes such as cement making.
"to run an electric car you need plenty of cheap, reliable electricity, something you don't get with solar and wind "
If you think you don't get it now, imagine what happens if everyone moves to EVs.
Solar/wind/etc can just about match existing carbon-emitting electricity production if you carpet the countryside with the things but replacing cars with EVs would quadruple that demand.
The _real_ cheap reliable electricity has to come from nuclear power. Fusion is unlikely to happen in our grandchildrens' lifetimes, so we'll have to settle for molten salt nuclear fission.
" 54 billion cubic feet ... of helium under Tanzania "
Which immediately leaked away through the hole drilled to find it.....
More seriously: There's helium in every natural gas field but it generally costs more to recover it than you get from selling it so drillers normally just vent it. The US broke the economics of helium a few years back by dumping their strategic reserve on the open market and crashing the price.
"The crashes are ones that people would not have."
Are they? Are you really sure about that?
"A human driver would have no problem with leaving the 101 for the 85"
And yet, the crash attenuator on the gore was removed, because someone had crashed into it in virtually the exact same manner as the Tesla did. Had it been there the crash would have been perfectly survivable.
More to the point, video of this piece of road clearly shows a misleading lane marker trivially capable of pulling unwary drivers directly into the gore - and I'll point out _again_ that someone had already crashed into the gore, which is why it was in the dangerous state it was in.
"Sorry, when your only option is between two idiots that will scam every penny out of their position while being inept at performing their duties, then there's no point voting at all."
It may surprise you to know that politicians know who voted and who didn't.
If you don't bother voting, they're not going to take any notice of your views. It doesn't matter if you spoil your ballot of vote for the monster raving loony party (which is a vote of no confidence in anyone) because they don't know _who_ you voted for, but the fact that you're motivated enough to go to the polling station means they pay attention.
The thought that scares politicians the most is that of 18-35yos collectively pulling their thumbs out of their arses and voting. Likewise all the habitual non-voters. (or put another way, your not voting is effectively two votes for the extremists)
"I discovered that their 3 year old Backup system, which consisted of a DAT tape getting backed up every night at 2am"
In the 21st century, what kind of sane person backs up to 4mm tape? Even if it _appears_ to have backed up OK, there's no guarantee that you can read it a year later, or even tomorrow (no read after write and the substrate sometimes goes wonky)
There's far more wrong with this than the CEO's error and your adding a /y to the script doesn't even begin to cover it (Hint, if the backups are using a script then it's not a backup system, it's a kludge)
"*#2 IPA, why not Meths?"
Meths is "mostly ethanol" - but the part that isn't is "mostly methanol" along with some particularly nasty petroleum compounds that really do nasty things to rubber.
The fun part is that some parts of the world, IPA is universally used as rubbing alcohol and whilst you might think you're buying IPA, you find that it has some oil mixed in.
"Nursing is the one degree course where a graduate is almost guaranteed a graduate salaried job anywhere in the UK."
Guaranteeing a job isn't the same as guaranteeing it's paid well enough to pay off that crippling student loan debt. What graduates are being offered is desultry and it's no wonder they're bailing for better pay overseas.
"Because you could get the same power from a modern engine that was smaller and burnt less fuel, which gives you more payload/range. "
Modern us military engines are pretty much "remove and service every other flight" - so I'm not sure about "reliable".
The "build lots of cheap ones" approach has a lot going for it, when you consider that even the best high-tech aircraft only has so many weapons stations to hang missles on.
Arthur C Clarke covered this in "Superiority" 60+ years ago.
" one crew used foam to clean up the resulting fuel spill. "
Aviation firefighting foam is quite toxic - a number of authorities around the world have ordered that it cease being used in training exercises due to problems with the runoff.
(not to mention it being very good at disguising people laying on the ground such that they end up being run over by the firefighting trucks, as happened at SFO)
"bounce anything going to more than 10 people in the CC field to the chief constable."
For £500 I'll reconfigure the email server to reject more than 3 in the Cc: list and limit the number of total recipients to 10.
More than that should use a mailing list.
"On first reading 3.6.3 I thought the same - however, now read section 5, then go back to 3.6.3, and you'll pick up on something you may have missed the first time."
Which is that RFCs (Particularly older RFCs) are generally written in badly formed american colloquial english, with an assumption that the reader is already familiar with the subject in question and easy access to the RFC author for clarification (because they're just down the hall)
The number of ambiguous phrases in RFCs is a constant source of amusement and annoyance. I've been told of non-native english speakers _screaming_ in RFC authors faces that their interpretation of the RFC is perfectly valid, despite it being the polar opposite of that the authors intended.
Very few RFCs are actually standards - the ones that are, are called STD{XX} - and even those ones are badly written.
"Has that ever been known to work when the email gets sent outside the organisation."
It usually doesn't work INSIDE the organisation. I can point to at leats a half dozen ways of ensuring that attempting it not only wont work but will highlight the message.
" the force recalled the mail "
If this is the level of knowledge of people using email, then I despair.
I'd really like email clients to include a snarky message under the "recall message" menu option, saying "If you wanted to do that you should have thought about it before hitting send or "I'm sorry Dave, it's impossible to do that and everyone's now laughing at you"
The problem with defamation law and litigation is that it turns the entire judicial process on its head.
The plaintiff doesn't have to prove anything. The onus is on you to disprove their claims about what you've said.
Effectively you're guilty until proven innocent.
"You have to counter out (most of) the Earth's orbital speed around the sun,"
Once out of the earth's gravity well you can (as you rightly said) use ion drive.
Size of the probe isn't that important. The heavier it is, the longer the ion drive needs to run, that's all (assuming you don't run out of reaction mass)
The good thing about heading sunwards is that you can be sure of your supply of photons. Solar panels rapidly lose effectiveness when you go on the other direction.
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