Posts by imanidiot 4422 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2012
I know of at least some heritage lines that have a volunteer night stoker if they have multi day running (weekends and such). Also, if they ARE raising steam on a loco most duty rosters I've seen start at 4 or 5 am to get the engine ready for a first run at 10 or 11-ish, with last shift closing the door at around 11 PM or midnight (to clean and cool down the locomotive in a controlled way after the last run at 5 or 6 PM). Running a steam loco is a LOT of work.
Your first mistake is thinking that road tax pays for road maintenance and infrastructure. It doesn't. Not by a long shot: https://pirg.org/edfund/media-center/who-pays-for-roads/ (note, I have no idea of the polical affiliation or agenda of that source, I just found the article and it seems to cover the basics to support my argument)
When operational, engines wouldn't usually be let down to full cold unless maintenance was required. When in the shed at night they'd keep a small fire in the box to keep the engine warm and the boiler "ticking over" so the engine could be out and ready to run in about an hour when the morning crew arrives (the hour is needed to build the fire up, take on water and coal, oil the motion, check the engine and buffer to the train)
At the very least I think Robert didn't do his own risk assessment for his supervisory role correctly. A job like this (especially after the underling already demonstrated a lack of understanding of the physics involved) should have involved some closer monitoring. Can be very hands off, from a distance, but closer monitoring nonetheless.
I'm still wondering who the heck actually benefits from these link spamming/farming SEO sites? I've never actually interacted with any of the sites beyond: Maybe this? Nope, this is garbage. *Close tab*.
If it's about shoving ads in my eyeballs it also miserably fails (no-script, u-block and a canvas blocker covers near everything so usually I just see a text page filled with useless text). How are these sites making money? Who benefits from their existance?
The big problem is that most people view being a doctor as really really hard. When in reality most of the medical profession is about absorbing massive amounts of information and being able to recall the right bits of it at the right time. That's not a particularly hard skill but one that is also not necessarily selected for by a graduate degree. There's probably a lot of people who would be excellent doctors who never get a chance, and lots of people being doctors who would be better off in a different profession.
(Don't get me wrong though, once you get past the general "becoming a doctor" part and go into any sort of specialization, more skills come into it. Surgeons are absolutely amazing on manual dexterity and control for instance.)
That's one of the good reasons it's worth it to have the IT team play "red team" every once in a while in a friendly competition. Winner is the on that gets in undetected, prize is something simple (get to leave an hour early, get the easy jobs for a week, a Mars bar from the vending machine, whatever) and the recognition of your coworkers for "being a smart bastard".
Then afterwards "blue team" the findings and how to close the holes everyone found.
I don't think it's been publicly stated anywhere. IIRC the flight article hadn't been shipped yet, so if it still exists I would assume it's somewhere with the Haines family.
And I don't think the big problem was with Spaceport America, it was the FAA dragging it's heels on the required permits for the rocket motor and the flight (and then SA not doing anything to assist either)
They can get as acerbic as they want, I ain't firing up the email and typing all sorts of stuff to show which is the article in question and make it a proper email, as I would be doing if I were to make an email. That corrections link should go to a simple web form that is automatically linked to the right article. I am not going to spend more than a dozen or so seconds caring about poor writing enough to make a correction. Writing an email is too much faff. So if I see a correction is needed, they can get it in the form of a reaction post or not at all as far as I care.
"Instead, the plan is to use the technology to miniaturize launch vehicles further"
That way madness lies if it's not just for hobby or research. There's not that much market for launching dedicated tiny sats to a custom orbit (counter to mass launching on a ride-share to a maybe not ideal but good enough orbit) and you're butting your head against strongly diminishing returns in propellant to payload mass fractions. A super big rocket (like SpaceX Falcon 9 or ULA Vulcan, is always going to be cheaper per KG to orbit than a tiny one.
Blame the EPA (at least in part) for requiring emissions control on tractors. You NEED at least some computers on a modern diesel to keep things running. On the financial side, a modern tractor does a heck of a lot more work on the same amount of fuel than an old Case 930, and fuel cost is certainly becoming a big overal cost in the budget of many farmers.
GPS is also mostly a cost thing. It lets farmers automatically regulate their equipment, planting less crop on less fertile or less well irrigated soil, applying more fertilizer or other products exactly where it's needed, etc. Overal this means better yields from the entire field at less cost, because it's not wasted planting seed in an area that will not grow a dense crop or applying too much fertilizer on good soil or too little on bad soil. And it allows a farmer to do that with less man-power overall, faster, than the old "everything manual" process.
Having GPS, or "a computer" isn't the problem. It's companies like JD insisting that they're the only ones capable of telling that computer that a filter was replaced, that a sensor fault should be ignored, that a certain satellite receiver should be connected to port 2, or just reading sensor outputs to determine where a fault lies. The big advantage of those old tractors of yours was that any 18 year old farm hand could look after them and fault-find if they didn't work. That SHOULD still be the case with modern tractors but "big agro" has decided there's no profit in that.
It's hard to implement anything even remotely creative or effective if it is not done in the pursuit of a specific outcome/goal. How to implement a sorting algorithm (or what algorithm to choose) can be very dependent on the source data and the desired outcome for instance. So just having "monkeys on typewriters" bashing out code, even if it's perfectly valid code, is unlikely to get you the sort of goal oriented, clever, efficient, and novel implementations that code "in the wild" is going to give. Which is why companies like GitHub are so eager to wholesale ingest anything and everything from sites like StackOverflow where actually smart people come to discuss smarter and more efficient ways of solving their problems.
Since no maximum height is specified and they're not talking volume, I think practically we should be assuming roughly up to the Karman line (100km). So all we need to do to solve the carbon problem is put one of those devices in every square meter and we'll have the atmosphere cleaned lickitysplit.
The big problem is that cats tend to not stick to only rodents. They'll go after birds too. Lots of birds. Like lots and lots and lots of birds.
I have no problem with people in rural areas keeping a few farm cats, usually they indeed have enough rodents to keep the cats busy and entertained. People in (sub-)urban areas? Keep your murdering shit machine indoors. If you want to let it out of the house, leash train it and take it out for a walk regularly. I've found far too many dead birds, chicks and disturbed birds nests (of multiple species already struggling and/or endangered) obviously taken out by a cat.
Cultural differences alone make it VERY hard to compare the markets Grab and WeChat operate in to the market X would have to establish itself in. As mentioned by the other commenter, X is also in a very different position in trying to position itself as an everything app to begin with. I've also seen plenty of things about those platforms that seem to indicate that they mostly became "everything" apps simply because all the alternatives were worse and they solved existing problems in a way the CCCP allowed (because it gave them oversight, insight and control). X on the other hand would have to become an everything app by... solving what problem exactly? There's a lot of choice in P2P payment apps and most of them are... fine. Not ideal, could be better, but X would have to provide significantly better service, terms or ease of use to supplant them.
Why would Musk be under the impression people even WANT an "everything app"? Why would anyone even begin to think "X" (still waiting for the lawsuits to start over the overly generic name) could be this "everything" app? Why would anyone trust "X" for payment processing? What USP would X offer over all the other P2P payment apps? Does Musk have even an inkling of a hint of an idea of just how much crap he's shoveling over his head going into banking?
His idea for X as an "everything" app failed and exploded in his face when he was at Paypal (that survived his attempts at implementing his idiocy and didn't get big until well after they kicked him out). Paypal became big despite Musk, not because of him. And it made him rich simply from having been an early investor and getting more shares as a golden parachute on his way out.
Additional info/update and some other interesting discussion on other aspects of the incidents (like the manuals not reporting the cockpit door unlocks and opens in case of an explosive decompression) by the usually very informative Blancolirio
For those wanting to know (a lot) more about the mechanics of the plug/door in question I can highly recommend the latest 2 videos on The 737 Technical Channel (titled: "737 mid-cabin emergency exit doors" and "737 mid-cabin emergency exit doors - plug option"
As far as helical spring washers the only correct usage imho (as a mechanical engineer) is: 1. Pick up entire package, 2. deposit entire package in metal recycling receptacle, 3a. buy proper locking washers if they are required or implement other safety locking measures; 3b. buy flat washers if you don't need locking washers.
Helical spring washers have been shown to be all but useless when it comes to preventing bolts loosening. They're pretty much just flat washers once tightened.
That explanation still doesn't quite make sense. The locking bolts that hold the door in place use a castellated nut with a split pin for securing/locking the nut. Several of the loose nuts and bolts shown in the pictures of loose fixtures found are the fixings for the fittings to the main body, which could easily remain/be in place while the plug itself was removed at Boeing for installing interior fittings.
Usually with these tales of Who, me? I consider the mistakes and screwups actual mistakes and screwups that anybody could have made and not deserving of termination. This tale however? Jack deserved his firing. The "whose name first" issue was petty in the first place and implementing program breaking (even if accidental) code with a "time trap" for swapping the names was petty in the supreme.
Don't really care in fresh water. At worst you might get aquaplaning of the brushes at some speeds. In salt water you'll lose some performance but the path through the coils should still be a far lower resistance, so you'll likely still get plenty of power out. There's other reasons you might not want to submerge your motors in salt water though (corrosion, corrosion and corrosion being the main 3. Followed shortly by more corrosion)
The biggest danger in getting swept away in flood waters is generally not so much the water, but all the crap floating in and getting tangled up in the water. Most cars will float for a surprisingly long time if the doors are kept shut, but get swept up in highly turbulent fast flowing water and unless you have a jet-boat capable of going on plane, you're going to get swept away, trapped under some logs and crushed to bits by all the debris getting rammed into you.
"the Cyber Truck, which has suffered from quality control issues."
This is by now an endemic Tesla problem. Their quality control is shit. I've STILL yet to see a Tesla with all straight and even panel line (to the eye, no need to break out the micrometer like the Japanse brands do). New vehicles seem to be hit or miss. Most are fine, some spend the first year of their life in and out of Tesla service centers for various ailments/DOAs that simply shouldn't have existed in a brand new vehicle leaving the factory. Quality of internal trim is also... not great. To the level I would expect of a Dacia or a Skoda or something, not a car as expensive as a Tesla.
All of this really has me wondering whether or not it might be time to just fire the entire production and factory engineering team and start fresh. But then I remember that that Tesla has always refused to listen to industry experts and claimed it could do everything better, faster and cheaper than the companies that have been making cars for decades and cost optimized their production lines to the last hay-penny. Then it all makes sense.
Some of Tesla's engineering (specifically drivetrain and battery) is impressive. Musk is the sort that seems to forget just how important factory and production engineering is to actually get mass produced products off the line correctly and on time.
The windows 10 calculator doesn't NEED to take up 39MB.. It's just that nobody found any need to program it in an efficient and space efficient manner because todays computers don't notice the bloat (compared to all the other bloat in Windows anyway.... How the frig does an OS need over 10 GB of disk space??)
Specifically Windows and Microsoft GUIs have been getting worse.
It seems with every new version of windows they feel they need to redo the GUI, then run out of time and budget (or managerial will power) to actually fix the GUI uniformly. So we end up with a slapdash, haphazard mess where some things follow the newest standard, some thing follow the last versions standard, some follow the NT standard, some don't seem to follow any standard. And so long as Windows keeps it's dominant position it is unlikely anyone at Microsoft will feel obligated to actually fix the mess.
Several countries were well on their way to full recovery before the Marshall plan help even arrived. There was still plenty of internal production happening.
Because I can't be arsed to search for a better source right now, from the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Modern_criticism
"The Marshall Plan's role in the rapid recovery of Western Europe has been debated. Most reject the idea that it alone miraculously revived Europe since the evidence shows that a general recovery was already underway. The Marshall Plan grants were provided at a rate that was not much higher in terms of flow than the previous UNRRA aid and represented less than 3% of the combined national income of the recipient countries between 1948 and 1951,[110] which would mean an increase in GDP growth of only 0.3%.[7] In addition, there is no correlation between the amount of aid received and the speed of recovery: both France and the United Kingdom received more aid, but West Germany recovered significantly faster.[7]"
GDP growth of 0.3%. I call that minor. In the meantime it also meant giving away the lead to the US on a lot of fronts (aviation, high end technologie, etc) because there wasn't enough market in the short term for any EU companies to survive if there was easy enough opportunity to import things from the US. So while it may have helped a little bit in the short term, long term it's one of the contributing factors to the British aviation industry all but disappearing for instance (not to mention the effect of having been focused on short term production of relatively short range and low altitude bombers and fighters, while the US could focus it's industrial might on building long range high altitude pressurized aircraft and then use that built up knowledge as it pleased without sharing it back to the UK. Which basically gave the transatlantic aviation business to US firms).
Part of the Marshall plan was also for European engineers to get to visit US plans to "see how it's done" but more importantly for US engineers to visit European plants and "tell them how its done" and "advice where they could improve". It's never been proven but extremely likely this also gave US engineers a very close look at European engineering and trade secrets they wouldn't otherwise have obtained.
"the Marshall Plan. (You're welcome, Europe!)"
That wasn't exactly free money. You are aware of that right? Part of it was loans, most of it came with strings attached. Those super-heavy machines you talk about were mostly bought because it was either required to buy US made equipment with the Marshall plan funds or because there was simply so much demand within Europe that European plants couldn't keep up with the demand and US machinery was required. Overall the Marshall plan only contributed a minor amount in the economic recovery of Europe (some economists argue negligible effect) but bought the US a lot of influence.
The reason most of these companies ARE american is because the rules and general sentiment in Europe wouldn't allow them to exist in the first place. Europe has a lot more history of laws, regulation and more importantly active oversight that prevents European orgs from becoming the robber baron nests that American corps so often become.
fun gags like that are fun the first time you encounter them, ONLY if you can then easily get on with your work. Anyone who puts stuff like that in production code so that it actually breaks your workflow... They deserve a keyboard with two letters that are always slightly sticky, no matter how much they clean it.
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