There are other things as well like GIS where massive amount of ram and fast disk access help out immensely. Because of things like this I always chuckle when I hear someone say that computers have gotten powerful enough (graphic cards seem to the be exception), since games aren't really limited by CPU or main memory any more there are always going to be cases where a more powerful machine is needed.
I haven't looked at basic 2WD truck prices so I don't know how much they vary between the 3 main brands, but I would imagine there is more than just base price Home Depot looks at when getting vehicles for their rental fleet. I would think that the overall maintenance and repair cost would be a larger concern than the marginal difference in vehicle cost. Having a lighter vehicle would probably help with the longevity of suspension parts and tire life since there would be less weight in the vehicle resting on them and after replacing vehicle suspensions $1500 would be cheap.
I doubt the flogging that the race version of the 300SLs or 3.0CSLs got was gentle and as always things like this tend to be seen first on higher end vehicles first where price is less of a concern.
One of the issues with aluminum body panels is that they have a greater tendency to spring back to their original shape than steel ones. This has meant that they are a bit more difficult to stamp out using the standard presses (you have to account for how much they spring back) but should mean when some asshole dings your door it has a higher likelihood of springing back to the correct shape and not getting that nice crease in it. The key here is that aluminum at the same strength (it will be thicker) is lighter than steel so while it will have more springiness it will still hold and support the same weight so tossing crap in the back for the truck won't cause the bed to crumple up like a sheet of aluminum foil.
When it comes to repair like pounding out a dent it will probably be a little more difficult since aluminum is more malleable and it will be a lot easier to spread the metal when working with a hammer and dolly but this should be easy to learn how to avoid since the problem already exists with steel but not to the same degree (use a softer hammer and don't strike the metal as hard). Granted welding aluminum is substantially different than welding steel since aluminum has a much lower melting point, is more reactive (different shielding gas is needed), and is more conductive but welding aluminum shouldn't be needed unless the panel is really banged up since it doesn't rust out like steel does.
The typical numbers I see quoted for grid losses (I happen to work in the power industry) is about 10%. The problems being discussed here aren't issues cause by a single residential install on a single low voltage (house hold 110/220 or 440 industrial) sub station. The grid could really care less as that isn't noticeable even if you have 14 KW installed capacity. You start having problems when you have a large number of residential installs on a single sub station. Since the switch gear at the substation wasn't designed to have power flow from the low voltage neighborhood to the medium voltage regional grid (it gets even worse going from medium voltage regional grid up to the high voltage bulk transport grid). Now to make matters worse lets take a typical scenario where you have a large install base of residential solar on a nice mostly sunny summer day. These are all feeding power into the neighborhood low voltage grid at your near by substation which is feeding excess power back into the medium voltage grid. Now you get one of these happy little clouds come by which drops the solar power production for most if not all of the neighborhood all at once. Now that substation goes from feeding power up to the medium voltage grid to drawing from it rather quickly.
Now these are solvable problems but will require a lot of infrastructure spending to update the hardware at substations, put in storage capacity for smoothing, and update the network management software (you will be modeling a lot more points and it is the traveling salesman problem). This doesn't even touch on the markets side of things as I know very little about that side of things but I would imagine there would need to be changes there as well.
Production car use of aluminum body panels in production cars goes back farther than the Audi's mentioned. Look at the BMW 507 and Mercedes Benz 300SL which had aluminum bodies (it was an option on the 300SL) from the 1950s. While the 60s did see the aluminum engine block it also saw the BMW 3.0CSL which had some aluminum body panels. There are probably many other old vehicles that made extensive use of aluminum that I am forgetting but it has become more common in recent years as a lower cost light weight material when compared to things like composites, which also have just as long of a history in production automotive use.
While other manufactures have made aluminum for vehicles for a while even this is an old story. Ford announced over a year ago that the next gen F150 was going to be aluminum. The previous announcement stated that it would add about $1500 to the cost of materials. Also this isn't ford's first time working with aluminum bodied vehicles as they have previously experimented with aluminum bodied Tauruses as well as producing aluminum bodied Jaguars.
I had a teacher in high school who held the belief that alcohol was something that initially all ancient civilizations had to develop. The reason being is that having the ability to produce alcohol meant that there were excesses in both production and labor. The allowed civilization to develop instead of just being a bunch of hunter gatherers scratching out subsistence lives. As an added benefit alcohol provided a nice way to preserve grain and fruits for consumption later.
As far as monastery beers go there were also the meal replacement beers (looking at you doppelbocks) during times of fasts when only liquids were allowed to be consumed.
I have wondered the same as I remember when I was younger if you ordered something (a rare thing then) that you wanted to make sure you ordered it 2 weeks to be sure it would arrive before Christmas and 7-10 days was about the bare minimum you could push it to.
And to provide you some support for manipulation of things with intrinsic value use the Hunt Brothers and Silver Thursday. Silver has many uses as an industrial metal so is usually assumed to have intrinsic value but was heavily manipulated. This is also why I don't believe the radio shills who are pushing silver saying it it cheap now and the point of comparison is the manipulated price in 1980.
I noticed the brightness thing as well and found that going from 60w incandescent bulbs to 75w equivalent CFLs seemed to solve that. As far as reliability of CFLs the only ones I have had to replace in the last 7 years are the ones in the kitchen and dining room that my kids like to flick on and off (think strobe light) and even then it has only been one bulb in each fixture so far. This is in an outer ring suburb in an older house, the power poles still have pole pigs on them as well so it isn't like this is new infrastructure. Also CFLs aren't that expensive, I just bought a box of them (couldn't find the box of bulbs that I know I have somewhere in the house but haven't had to find in 2 years) and it was a 5 pack of 75w equivalent GE CFL bulbs and cost $9.99 at the grocery store.
Most of the CFLs in my house have never burned out, the only ones that I have had to replace are the ones in the kitchen and dining room since those are on switches that the kids can reach and they have recently discovered the strobe light effect and will flick the light off and on as fast as they can until mom or I catch them. That is just brutal on the CFLs and I still get more than a year out of them, and have only had to replace one out of each fixture so far.
Sounds like you need a better working fluid. Living in a cold climate (Minnesota where we have had a couple of weeks with temps below 0 F already this year) there are several installers who can provide a system that work year round and don't need an auxiliary heating unit when it is cold. I have looked into getting a ground source heat pump installed and when my existing furnace or air conditioner fails I will be going ahead with the install, but with perfectly functional reasonably new equipment it is hard to justify replacement at the moment.
Every time one of these agencies make these unbelievable claims I send off letters to my congress critters laying out these stats to point out why they should end these programs. Like you I know why they do these things but I try to get my supposed representatives to listen as well as anyone else who wants to try and work on their representatives but there are too many people who think there is a terrorist under every rock and behind every blade of grass.
Let's take them at their word and say that they did manage to stop 50 attacks. So that works out to about 4 attacks per year for the past 12 years. I will even give them the benefit that every attack would have killed as many people as the 9/11 attack. So that would give us somewhere around 13,000 people per year that would have been killed by these attacks. So without their violation of our rights terrorism would rank behind drug abuse and we don't seem to care that much about drug abuse. Even if all 50 attacks happened this year and each one killed ~3000 people the body count would only be 150,000 and terrorism would come in at #2 between being a fat ass and being a smoker.
Now in reality the number of attacks is probably much lower than the 50 they claim, and I would be willing to bet that at most a few dozen people would be killed in the most devastating of these attacks. So as others have pointed out before why are we wasting so much money and violating everyone's rights for something that is little more than a statistical anomaly.
Putting a camera or hatch on the front of the cutting head makes no sense. It presses hard against a rock face and would just get smashed or scuffed up. A number of these machines will have some forward looking capacity by taking a core sample ahead of the machine regularly but unless the sample managed to drill into the unknown object they wouldn't know it was there.
Here is a nice video from a company that makes these rather impressive machines it should answer all of your question as to how they work and why they don't have cave ins behind the machine. In softer than expected soil, like hitting a deep spot of dirt in limestone, sink holes can develop in front of the cutting head as was a frequent problem on the SMART Tunnel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
I am not a tunnel excavating expert but my 5 year old thinks these are among the coolest machines that have ever been constructed and likes educational shows that are about tunneling where they use a TBM.
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There are other things as well like GIS where massive amount of ram and fast disk access help out immensely. Because of things like this I always chuckle when I hear someone say that computers have gotten powerful enough (graphic cards seem to the be exception), since games aren't really limited by CPU or main memory any more there are always going to be cases where a more powerful machine is needed.
I haven't looked at basic 2WD truck prices so I don't know how much they vary between the 3 main brands, but I would imagine there is more than just base price Home Depot looks at when getting vehicles for their rental fleet. I would think that the overall maintenance and repair cost would be a larger concern than the marginal difference in vehicle cost. Having a lighter vehicle would probably help with the longevity of suspension parts and tire life since there would be less weight in the vehicle resting on them and after replacing vehicle suspensions $1500 would be cheap.
I doubt the flogging that the race version of the 300SLs or 3.0CSLs got was gentle and as always things like this tend to be seen first on higher end vehicles first where price is less of a concern.
One of the issues with aluminum body panels is that they have a greater tendency to spring back to their original shape than steel ones. This has meant that they are a bit more difficult to stamp out using the standard presses (you have to account for how much they spring back) but should mean when some asshole dings your door it has a higher likelihood of springing back to the correct shape and not getting that nice crease in it. The key here is that aluminum at the same strength (it will be thicker) is lighter than steel so while it will have more springiness it will still hold and support the same weight so tossing crap in the back for the truck won't cause the bed to crumple up like a sheet of aluminum foil.
When it comes to repair like pounding out a dent it will probably be a little more difficult since aluminum is more malleable and it will be a lot easier to spread the metal when working with a hammer and dolly but this should be easy to learn how to avoid since the problem already exists with steel but not to the same degree (use a softer hammer and don't strike the metal as hard). Granted welding aluminum is substantially different than welding steel since aluminum has a much lower melting point, is more reactive (different shielding gas is needed), and is more conductive but welding aluminum shouldn't be needed unless the panel is really banged up since it doesn't rust out like steel does.
The typical numbers I see quoted for grid losses (I happen to work in the power industry) is about 10%. The problems being discussed here aren't issues cause by a single residential install on a single low voltage (house hold 110/220 or 440 industrial) sub station. The grid could really care less as that isn't noticeable even if you have 14 KW installed capacity. You start having problems when you have a large number of residential installs on a single sub station. Since the switch gear at the substation wasn't designed to have power flow from the low voltage neighborhood to the medium voltage regional grid (it gets even worse going from medium voltage regional grid up to the high voltage bulk transport grid). Now to make matters worse lets take a typical scenario where you have a large install base of residential solar on a nice mostly sunny summer day. These are all feeding power into the neighborhood low voltage grid at your near by substation which is feeding excess power back into the medium voltage grid. Now you get one of these happy little clouds come by which drops the solar power production for most if not all of the neighborhood all at once. Now that substation goes from feeding power up to the medium voltage grid to drawing from it rather quickly.
Now these are solvable problems but will require a lot of infrastructure spending to update the hardware at substations, put in storage capacity for smoothing, and update the network management software (you will be modeling a lot more points and it is the traveling salesman problem). This doesn't even touch on the markets side of things as I know very little about that side of things but I would imagine there would need to be changes there as well.
Early morning typo the "not" should be "no"
Not speculation by Goldman Sachs but a little scam that they figured out how to do.
Production car use of aluminum body panels in production cars goes back farther than the Audi's mentioned. Look at the BMW 507 and Mercedes Benz 300SL which had aluminum bodies (it was an option on the 300SL) from the 1950s. While the 60s did see the aluminum engine block it also saw the BMW 3.0CSL which had some aluminum body panels. There are probably many other old vehicles that made extensive use of aluminum that I am forgetting but it has become more common in recent years as a lower cost light weight material when compared to things like composites, which also have just as long of a history in production automotive use.
While other manufactures have made aluminum for vehicles for a while even this is an old story. Ford announced over a year ago that the next gen F150 was going to be aluminum. The previous announcement stated that it would add about $1500 to the cost of materials. Also this isn't ford's first time working with aluminum bodied vehicles as they have previously experimented with aluminum bodied Tauruses as well as producing aluminum bodied Jaguars.
I had a teacher in high school who held the belief that alcohol was something that initially all ancient civilizations had to develop. The reason being is that having the ability to produce alcohol meant that there were excesses in both production and labor. The allowed civilization to develop instead of just being a bunch of hunter gatherers scratching out subsistence lives. As an added benefit alcohol provided a nice way to preserve grain and fruits for consumption later.
As far as monastery beers go there were also the meal replacement beers (looking at you doppelbocks) during times of fasts when only liquids were allowed to be consumed.
It wasn't me, I just pissed in them.
He probably also blames the clerk at the gas station every time gas prices go up, and the dealers at the blackjack table when he hits a 16 and busts.
At least I feel better now knowing that I am not the only person that this has happened to.
I have wondered the same as I remember when I was younger if you ordered something (a rare thing then) that you wanted to make sure you ordered it 2 weeks to be sure it would arrive before Christmas and 7-10 days was about the bare minimum you could push it to.
It's Craptastic!
And to provide you some support for manipulation of things with intrinsic value use the Hunt Brothers and Silver Thursday. Silver has many uses as an industrial metal so is usually assumed to have intrinsic value but was heavily manipulated. This is also why I don't believe the radio shills who are pushing silver saying it it cheap now and the point of comparison is the manipulated price in 1980.
I noticed the brightness thing as well and found that going from 60w incandescent bulbs to 75w equivalent CFLs seemed to solve that. As far as reliability of CFLs the only ones I have had to replace in the last 7 years are the ones in the kitchen and dining room that my kids like to flick on and off (think strobe light) and even then it has only been one bulb in each fixture so far. This is in an outer ring suburb in an older house, the power poles still have pole pigs on them as well so it isn't like this is new infrastructure. Also CFLs aren't that expensive, I just bought a box of them (couldn't find the box of bulbs that I know I have somewhere in the house but haven't had to find in 2 years) and it was a 5 pack of 75w equivalent GE CFL bulbs and cost $9.99 at the grocery store.
Well there were plenty of people screaming mad about the light bulb ban when Bush signed it, and then there was MN 6th district congressperson and the Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act.
Most of the CFLs in my house have never burned out, the only ones that I have had to replace are the ones in the kitchen and dining room since those are on switches that the kids can reach and they have recently discovered the strobe light effect and will flick the light off and on as fast as they can until mom or I catch them. That is just brutal on the CFLs and I still get more than a year out of them, and have only had to replace one out of each fixture so far.
Sounds like you need a better working fluid. Living in a cold climate (Minnesota where we have had a couple of weeks with temps below 0 F already this year) there are several installers who can provide a system that work year round and don't need an auxiliary heating unit when it is cold. I have looked into getting a ground source heat pump installed and when my existing furnace or air conditioner fails I will be going ahead with the install, but with perfectly functional reasonably new equipment it is hard to justify replacement at the moment.
Every time one of these agencies make these unbelievable claims I send off letters to my congress critters laying out these stats to point out why they should end these programs. Like you I know why they do these things but I try to get my supposed representatives to listen as well as anyone else who wants to try and work on their representatives but there are too many people who think there is a terrorist under every rock and behind every blade of grass.
Let's take them at their word and say that they did manage to stop 50 attacks. So that works out to about 4 attacks per year for the past 12 years. I will even give them the benefit that every attack would have killed as many people as the 9/11 attack. So that would give us somewhere around 13,000 people per year that would have been killed by these attacks. So without their violation of our rights terrorism would rank behind drug abuse and we don't seem to care that much about drug abuse. Even if all 50 attacks happened this year and each one killed ~3000 people the body count would only be 150,000 and terrorism would come in at #2 between being a fat ass and being a smoker.
Now in reality the number of attacks is probably much lower than the 50 they claim, and I would be willing to bet that at most a few dozen people would be killed in the most devastating of these attacks. So as others have pointed out before why are we wasting so much money and violating everyone's rights for something that is little more than a statistical anomaly.
Seems like it might be good. but I don't know if the environment these operate in would allow for effective use.
Putting a camera or hatch on the front of the cutting head makes no sense. It presses hard against a rock face and would just get smashed or scuffed up. A number of these machines will have some forward looking capacity by taking a core sample ahead of the machine regularly but unless the sample managed to drill into the unknown object they wouldn't know it was there.
Look in the above comments.
Here is a nice video from a company that makes these rather impressive machines it should answer all of your question as to how they work and why they don't have cave ins behind the machine. In softer than expected soil, like hitting a deep spot of dirt in limestone, sink holes can develop in front of the cutting head as was a frequent problem on the SMART Tunnel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
I am not a tunnel excavating expert but my 5 year old thinks these are among the coolest machines that have ever been constructed and likes educational shows that are about tunneling where they use a TBM.