The same principle applies to auto mechanics. I am one of the few and proud that still seems to take pride in being able to work on their own ride, partly for financial reasons, partly for the challenge of it, and partly to make sure it is done right. It seems like every project lately means a trip to buy at least one special tool or another. An angle grinder for my rusty bumper, a MAPP torch to build a luggage rack for my Magna, a heavy-duty floor jack to lift the frame of my old '93 F-150 to replace the rusty spring brackets, and a special socket I needed to replace the rotors on my "new" '94 4WD F-150, to name a few.
In every case the cost of the tools was still a fraction of the cost of labor and parts markup I would have paid to a mechanic, and the new tools encourage me to tackle more challenging repairs. Often these tools have uses I couldn't have dreamed of when I brought them.
If you expect the axe to fall in a few months, you might have time to fatten up the checking account by cutting back or delaying expenditures but certain things will always get you, as certain as the grass will grow, such as:
Car Expenses: Waiting to get that odd noise or that check engine light dealt with can leave you stranded on the way to a job interview, and stuck with a big towing and repair bill. Learn to do your own car maintenance, and have some basic tools. Fixing worn stuff before it leaves you stranded will save you lots of money and grief in the long run. The last 10 percent of the tread of a tire is worth about the cost of a McDonald's lunch, but a flat on the side of I-695 at rush hour with a busted jack and a flat spare will cost you more than a brand new set of tires. Same goes for brakes, belts, hoses, and driveline stuff like U-joints and CV Axles.
Getting Car Stuff fixed in a timely manner is good, but being able to do it yourself is even better. You often get the "mechanic's price" for the part, but for repairs that can be done in your driveway or garage in an afternoon or less, you also avoid the hassle of having to drop off, wait for, or lose the use of your car for the day. In tough times, a reliable car that is in good repair is an asset, even if it is older, a car prone to breakdown is a potential liability.
The same principle goes with stuff around the house. A drip around the water heater will soon turn into a flooded basement if not dealt with in a timely manner. Some basic plumbing and electrical knowledge and a $200 water heater from Lowes can hold off a $500 plumbers bill and thousands of dollars worth of ruined carpets and appliances from a flooded basement.
Don't forget to consider your own skills and talents as assets to be built up. Investing all your time and energy in uber-specialized skills might make you a highly sought-after guru for a while, that is, until that uber-specialty is rendered obsolete, or a whole bunch of people get the certification in that specialty. I've seen the hot specialty in IT go from FORTRAN/COBOL to PASCAL to System Analyst to Novell to MCSE to Java, etc. I have certainly missed a few other hot IT careers that have come and gone, but I am stll about only midway through my working life. Having a variety of skills gives you vocational alternatives, but makes you a more interesting person besides, which leads to my final point:
Perhaps your greatest asset of all, but perhaps the most intangible as well, is your relationships with your friends, family, and coworkers. The isolated workaholic has to buy everything he needs from the "regular" economy at list price. For example, he has to store his extra stuff at Public Storage for $100 a month for a closet-sized warehouse. A person who is well connected will have friends or family with extra space in their attic who will store it for free, in exchange for help fixing their motorcycle, computer, or painting their bedroom. It is best to build up these favors in advance by giving freely of yourself, and expecting no immediate and specific return. By being willing to store a friend's stuff if you have the room, he will probably find some way to return the favor, such as an enjoyable evening out, an extra ticket to a sold-out concert, or maybe an introduction to a wonderful young lady to which you might cultivate a long and mutually beneficial relationship with.
We are using new forms at work to take advantage of ICR or Intelligent Character Recognition Software for our service reports. Each letter is entered into little boxes. The reports are then scanned, gaps are filled by a data entry clerk, then we are emailed an electronic "grade" by the software, based on the percentage of fields that were machine readable. With reasonable care, most of the guys can get the machine to resolve 80 to 90 percent of the fields. Of course it slows down how fast we can fill out our service reports, so in the end I wonder how much time they really save.
According to the Wiki article I referenced, MICR has an error rate of about 1 in 20,000 checks. This does deserve a bit of explanation though. As someone who works as a technician with modern check processing equipment, I can say that an error rate of 1 in 20,000 does not mean that a MICR or OCR system can successfully read 19,999 out of 20,000 checks fed into the machine. This is the rate that the MICR will read one account number and mistake it for another. In reality, the typical Magnetic MICR can read about 96 or 97 percent. If the MICR comes across an unreadable MICR character, it will reject that item. The Account Numbers and Routing Transit numbers on the MICR line of a check are also set up so that a checksum can be performed on the sum of the digits on the MICR line and verify that the information is valid. Inconsistencies in printing can affect MICR as it does OCR, but the fact that the data is printed in magnetic ink and read magnetically mean that stray marks from customers signatures, check decorations etc. do not adversely affect the readability of the information.
The typical account information line printed at the bottom of your typical credit card statement or utility bill is printed in a font known as OCR-A. Equipment for machine reading this type of font has been around for over 25 years, such as some of the old Banctec 4300 series workstations used for processing bill payments and checks. Even these 1970s era machines had better than a 95 percent read rate of the entire account information line, provided that the printing was clear and properly placed. Later machines, such as the NCR 7780 or the OPEX Eagle can have better than a 99 percent read rate of a full line of characters. Again, the usual limitations on reliability of OCR characters are a result of poor or mislocated printing, or stray marks in the OCR field. Here is the obligatory Wikipedia link if you interested in finding out a bit more about the history of Optical Character Recognition.
MICR fonts, which are those funny looking numbers printed in magnetic ink at the bottom of most checks are designed to be human recognizable but machine readable, and have been around since the '60s. OCRA typically beats MICR today, but a good MICR line is still readable over 95 percent of the time.
Handwritten fonts are the most difficult to read, but the technology has been available to read handwritten numbers and letters for over 10 years, but typical read rates for something like a handwritten zip code or the numerical amount written on a check range from 60 to 80 percent, and are slowly getting better. Again, a lot depends on how much care is taken when writing out the text, and what kind of background clutter is present.
As for me, I typed out school reports in 8th grade in 1973, when our family's word processing hardware consisted of a 1940's vintage Underwood typewriter. Even humans had difficulty decoding my handwriting!
With much fanfare, Maryland's new E-voting sytem was unveiled to the public at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. This replaced an electronic system of paper ballots that were filled out like the op-scan forms used for so many surveys and standardized tests for the last 30 or 40 years. At least some privacy was provided to prevent others from seeing a completed form and being able to link it to a particular voter, and the voter himself or herself fed the form into the scanning machine. For the most part I liked this system, the paper forms provided annonymity, the advantages of electronic tabulation of results, and a built in ability to audit the results.
The new sytem had nice pretty touchscreen displays, smart cards to enable the machines, and the ability to review and change your choices before hitting the "Vote" button. The new system did not provide any kind of hard copy tabulation though, and I worry about what might happen to my vote in case a plug gets kicked out of the wall or lightning strikes the transformer outside the fire station where I vote. In the hands of inexperienced volunteers, would they think to put all the machines on UPSs? In my area, the polls at the local precinct are traditionally run by mostly retirees who volunteer for the job, not by IT guys who set up ATMs and the like. Under the old system, if a machine crashed and burned, you could just refeed the paper data into another machine and not lose a vote.
An area in both the old and new systems that had me concerned wasn't so much the technology of the voting systems, but the recordkeeping of eligible voters. In 2002, I lived in my grandmother's old house, had the same last name and found out that she was still in the registered voter database, despite that fact she had been dead for 5 years and had been out of the area for 10. I made a joke about voting for her, but also asked them to update their database. Having representatives of all interested political parties working at the polls usually keeps people honest, but I can imagine in certain precincts there could be no opposition party workers. Without anyone of the opposition party to watch over their shoulders, collusion could result in ballot box stuffing and other shenanigans. In a close race, a few hundred extra votes for one candidate or another could swing an election, and with that the political direction of an entire state or country.
Sometimes it can make sense to own two vehicles, especially if you drive a lot or live in the country. I own a "road warrior" vehicle, a 2000 Accord I brought new and drive almost 30,000 miles a year. It is comfortable and dependable, handles well, has good performance, and gets almost 30 mpg. It definitely has major issues hauling things like lumber, plywood, cow manure, etc, and has real trouble with deep snow.
Enter my other vehicle, a 12 year old 4WD F-150 with 180.000 miles on it that is hard to park, gets about 15 mpg, and drives like -- a truck. I only drive it 3 or 4 thousand miles a year, either when the snow seriously starts to fly, when I need a ton of gravel, organic fertilizer, or to haul a big load of stuff home from Home Depot. It also makes an adequate backup vehicle when my other car is in the shop, so I don't have to rent a car or pay a premium for someone who will fix it fast, when I could fix it myself given a little time and something to run around in in the meantime. Adequate pickups for second vehicle status can be had for a couple of thousand bucks or less.
The big thing that stinks about one person owning two vehicles is that the DMV and the insurance companies seem to think that you should pay almost as much for the second vehicle as the first even though you can only drive one at a time. Regrettably, there isn't much you do except pay cash for the old truck to avoid having to shell out for collision coverage.
This strategy works better out in the country, where parking is plentiful and insurance rates are lower. In more crowded urban areas, insurance and parking costs tend to make owning 2 vehicles a less attractive proposition.
I just got ticked off and used my "back" button. However IIRC, you needed to provide a valid email address to complete the registration process, leaving it open to spam. Time to reactivate my Hotmail account!
La Times and their "associates" want to spam and telemarket you even if you opt out of non-affiliates, and they still want your phone #, income, age, sex, address and other sensitive information. Why not just ask for my freaking SSN and bank statements!! Read their privacy policy!
Here is one way to think about this statement: If the local electricty is generated by burning oil/propane/gas, then by the time it reaches your TV set or computer, only about 40 percent at best of the original energy is left, the rest is dissapated in the turbines, the smokestacks, wastewater, and resistance losses in the transformers and power lines along the way. Modern oil or gas furnaces are 90% efficient or better, and just about anything less than 30 years old is 80 percent efficient if it has been maintained properly. Even if the local utility gets its boiler fuel at a bulk discount, it will cost them at least twice as much to generate the electrical energy as it would to get that same amount of heat by burning same fuel directly in your own furnace.
The relative economics of different types of energy sources can skew these calculations. In Central Maryland, electrical rates are relatively low (about 7 cents/Kwh) due to the fact that BGE generates much of its electricity with nuclear, coal, and hydroelectric sources. It is almost as cheap to turn on the electric stove than it is to run the gas furnace this winter. In other areas, electricity is running nearly twice the cost here, due to the fact that the utilities in those areas burn mostly oil and gas to generate their electricity.
Of course, generating heat by leaving electronics, as well as electric lights and appliances on in the summertime is doubly expensive. You not only pay for the electricity it takes to keep these things powered up, but you also pay the additional cost for the air conditioning to remove the excess heat from your living space. I am actually considering putting in an additional HVAC register in my computer room because it gets several degrees hotter than the rest of the house in summer. I will definitely need it if I want to set up some of my old tube-type ham gear again and want to stay comfortable in here during the warmer months of the year.
As long as we are getting off onto a tangent about salespeople versus technical types, I would like to add this observation from my many years in field service: A good tech always has a little bit of salesman in him. Even though I work in a business where most of our customers are covered under an all-inclusive service contract, it is often necessary to negotiate with the customer, either to arrange downtime to do maintenance or upgrades, or to investigate issues that are not immediately apparent and need time to resolve. Often there is a choice between doing a minimal repair or workaround that can be done quickly and get them back up and running, but not fully address the problem, or doing a major repair which may take several hours and cause major disruption to their operations.
Determining the optimal solution for a given situation requires not only technical knowledge, but knowledge of the the customer's wider operation as well. For example, if I find a bearing starting to fail on a peak workday, the optimal solution may very well be to squirt a little WD-40 into it every once in a while, then do a rebuild of the module after lunch, once the day's most important deadlines are past. On the other hand, if that same bearing starts to rumble the day before a long holiday weekend, the optimal solution may be to sell the customer on an immediate and thorough repair, despite the interruption to the customer's workflow in order to prevent downtime when service is expensive and possibly not immediately available.
A little technician's salemanship can also help make the salesperson's job easier as well. I will often do a little suggestive "selling" to a customer if I see a need that could be met by one of our products. I will mention it to the manager and call the sales staff to follow up. More sales = more work for us techs = job security.
The better the insulation, the greater effect thermal mass will have on your house. I recently had built a new modular house with Energy Star windows, R-30 in the ceiling, R-19 in the walls, and an R-6 Mylar faced insulating blanket on the basement walls extending from the joists to below the frostline, and am heating with a Trane high efficiency heatpump backed up by propane. Because of the good insulation, even if it is in the 20's outside, the temperature only drops a degree an hour or so if I turn back the thermostat. If you want to keep the house at 70 during the morning breakfast hours, cool at 60 when away, and 65 at night, the temperature does not really have an opportunity to settle at your programmed levels, at least not for very long. I have thought about getting a programmable thermostat, but I am lazy and just keep the house at 70 all the time, unless I am going to be away for a couple of days or more.
Keeping the house at a constant temperature has advantages in itself. Because of the lag in warming the walls, floors, etc. compared to the air, keeping the temperature at a constant compromise setting insures that those surfaces you touch feel warm as well. If the air is 72 degrees, but your desk is 65, you will have cold hands, and that isn't even talking about how cold the bathroom floor feels at night after cutting back the heat. By the time the floor, counters, and desk are warm, you are well onto your way to work.
The house itself also tends to benefit from constant temperature as well. I found out the hard way that temperature swings can make drywall crack after I heated the house back up after cutting the heat back to 50 when I went away for several days. Frequent temperature variations also start to work loose fasteners such as nails and screws as well, and can eventually result in squeaky floors, cracked grout, and nail pops in drywall as well.
Because of the improvements in windows, doors, heating systems, and insulation built into newer houses, my new house has about half the energy cost of my old 1946 vintage farmhouse, despite being 20 percent larger and built on the same windswept hill as my old house. One thing that is important when doing major energy efficiency upgrades to insulation and windows is to optimize the heating system for the new heat loss characteristics of the house. Just as a big pickup truck needs a V-8 to move it along as well as a Civic with a 4 banger, a house with major improvements to doors, windows, and insulation will be able to get by with a smaller furnace as well. If you are replacing an oil furnace with another, keep this in mind if you have the opportunity to replace the furnace. If the furnace has been recently replaced, you might still be able to tweak some things like nozzle size, fuel pressure, etc. to optimize what you have.
Another thing to consider if the furnace is on the "to do" list is to investigate Geothermal Heat Pumps . They are not for everyone, and the capital investment can have a fairly long payback period, but if you are blessed with suitable soil, a large enough lot, or a nearby body of water, they can cut your heating and air conditioning bills to a fraction of the cost of heating with oil or other fossil fuels. I made the decision not to go with the Geothermal heat pump because of the extra cost and a rapidly tightening construction budget, but with the recent increases in the price of propane and looming increases in electricity, it is one decision I might have reconsidered.
Not even that works, just look at all the hooha that is being made about Yucca Mountain . It is located in one of the most bleak and god forsaken corners of this country, and is almost 2 hours north of Las Vegas, in the middle of the Nevada Nuclear Test Range. Despite its remote location, suitability for long-term waste storage, and the billions already and yet to be spent to insure safe operation on a scale of thousands of years, it is still not good enough in the eyes of nuclear power's detractors.
Mass and tire grip are important, but another important factor is the ratio of sprung to unsprung weight. Sprung weight usually includes the engine, body, parts of the driveline and passengers. Unsprung weight includes the wheels, tires, brakes, and parts of the suspension below the springs. One of the reasons sports cars handle so well is that their unsprung weight is low. Cars with a lightweight independent suspension have relatively low unsprung weight compared to a 4 wheel drive pickup with solid differentials.
When the supsension hits a dip or bump, the less mass the suspension has compared to the body, the less effect the body has on the suspension's ability to conform to the road, and the less the bumps on the road affect the stability of the body.
A lot of electrons are being thrown around about how sales tax is giving internet retailers an 'unfair advantage' compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. I ended up splitting my money roughly evenly between Amazon and their ilk, and their brick and mortar equivalents. Even with roughly equal prices, the internet stores allow the customer to avoid a major costly, time consuming, and stressful part of holiday shopping: the trip to the mall. If you figure the cost of car operation, and the time wasted driving, parking, walking past stores you won't patronize, and the aches and pains of shlepping all those packages around, sales tax barely registers. People are realizing that avoiding much of the hassle is valuable in itself.
On the other hand, when I finally broke down and went to the local Mega Mall and went into the Books a Million to get a few fill-in gifts, I was surprised by how much being able to scan a large number of titles in a very short time was helpful in selecting gifts for hard to buy for relatives. While Amazon has their suggestive selling algorithms to suggest related information, seeing a book out of the corner of my eye frequently had me saying K--- would like this or TR would like that. It just isn't possible to present that kind of information as completely online as it is in a brick and mortar environment.
Spinoffs are a way of forcing the now independent business units to survive on their own merits. Often money losing divisions are spun off and allowed to lapse into bankruptcy or liquidation, rather than continuing to be a drain on the parent company's profits. The first time I remember this, I was a vendor for the former Wal-Mart wannabee Woolco, which was a 300 store chain that was part of F.W. Woolworth into the early '80s. I remember the old timers seeing this as a bad omen when they were spun off from their parent. Sure enough, 2 months later they held their going out of business sale. In this case everybody loses their job.
On the other hand, spinning off a troubled division can free it from the meddling, interference and bad decisions of a parent company that is out of touch with the soul of the division being spun off. One of the most famous examples of this was Harley-Davidson. Harley-Davidson became part of AMF Corporation during the diversification frenzy of the 1960s and 1970s. AMF ran everything from machine tools to bowling alley equipment to sporting goods. Harley-Davidson motorcycles were just another product to be manufactured, and their desirability and quality hit an all-time low during this era. They had been pretty much run into the ground by the time they were spun off, but the new company (with a little help from tarriffs on large Japanese motorcycles) was able to turn things around, and their bikes now sell at large premiums compared to comparable Japanese models, and they own nearly half of the domestic market for motorcycles.
Finally, the economies of reduced overhead for administrative functions by a small business being absorbed by a larger one are often disappointing, due to the cost of integrating information systems, manufacturing and distribution facilities, and the culture clash between organizations that takes place during mergers. In recent years I have stood by as the banking business has undergone wave after wave of consolidations and mergers. On the operational level, it takes years to sort out everything from management structure to what equipment they should retain, move, buy, or sell. Many of my customers have seen the name on their buildings change several times, but they are pretty much the same bunch of people doing the same type of work they have always done. In the meantime, an organizational paralysis often sets in as employees and managers worry more about how they will fit into the new organization instead of building the business.
Going the other way and spinning off a division gives the new company the freedom to select the types of services, equipment, people, and structure that are appropriate for the size and type of business they are in. There might still be some duplication of a few things, but the smaller organization does not need for instance, the large and complex systems that large organizations do.
Yeah, I ride too, and I wear my helmet. Seriously, what about people who suffer crippling brain injuries, along with other "mentally challenged" individuals, habitual felons, the physically deformed and other "undesirables? Do they get treatments? For how long? Who decides? Do we want to be keeping millions of Terry Schiavos alive for hundreds of years? Do we allow "nature to take its course" with certain designated classes. Do only the rich or well-connected get to take treatments? I fear the type of world this will lead to.
Recycled asphalt paving is worth about $5/ton to the local asphalt plant here in MD. Not a lot of money, and it is cheaper than the aggregate stone it is mostly made from, but it is worthwhile to grind it off the road even at that price. 5 dollars a ton is better than paying a landfill to take it, because in many cases it is necessary to remove the worn, cracked and rutted asphalt anyway in order to maintain proper road grades, overpass clearances, and so on.
I purchased about 100 tons of the stuff directly from the haulers which would otherwise haul it back to the asphalt plant while a nearby road was resurfaced recently. I used the asphalt grindings as an alternative to Crusher Run (raw gravel out of the rock crushers at the quarry) as a paving material for my piece of a private road that serves several houses besides mine. Unlike the local limestone, it won't get quickly ground into dust, but will sort of knit back into asphalt by traffic on a hot day. Us country folks jump at the chance to get it, particularly at wholesale prices. The only disadvantage is that some of it was lumpy, where chunks of pavement are picked up somewhat intact, but I used those where I needed to fill holes or build up an area.
Back at the asphalt plant, the grindings are mixed with fresh aggregate, and a mixture of new asphalt "juice" and lighter petroleum fractions. When they first experimented with asphalt recycling, the old asphalt would melt and lay down just fine but would soon crack. This was because as time goes on, the lighter oils that were mixed in with the original asphalt acted like a plasticizer and evaporated, leaving the pavement brittle.
Though the parent was modded funny, there is a lot of truth in that sage comment. At present time, the average person in the first world has about an annual lifetime risk of dying due to accidental trauma in the range from 1 in 500 to about 1 in 1000. People who work in certain professions/occupations have a higher risk as well. Infantrymen in Iraq might have an annual risk of violent death of about 1 percent, but people who work as commercial fishermen, in construction trades, drive trucks, or work as policemen or firemen also face above average risks as well.
Another factor not to be discounted lightly is the risk of disabling injuries. I saw few if any grey heads working on the roof of my recently constructed house in the crew of about 8 or 9 guys out there. People tend to abandon risky occupations as they get older if they can, either they suffer physically disabling injuries themselves, or see enough of their friends get hurt that they decide to find a safer way to make a living. Even as lifespans have increased by the relatively modest amounts over the last 50 years or so, one of the biggest problems will be finding help to put new roofs on their houses, take down overgrown trees, etc.
If life spans increase 10 fold, the amount of dangerous work will not go down that much, but the pool of people willing to do that kind of work will diminish to nearly the vanishing point. If people live to be 1,000, occupations such as truck drivers, roofers, cops, and many of the construction trades will either be a death sentence, or something that most people will be unable to do for more than a few decades before being disabled or forced to seek safer employment. People may become too risk-averse for society to function.
Just a thought: Generating a KW of electricity to keep ISS in orbit will require solar panels, or enough fuel on board to keep a generator or fuel cell going. Having dabbled in Amateur Satellites, the most precious thing aboard a satellite is power. Based on reasonably current solar technology available at my local marine store, it takes about a square foot of solar panel to generate just 10 watts. To generate a thousand, it would take a solar panel the size of three sheets of plywood. In the vacuum of space the output would be higher, and NASA might use more efficient panels, but during eclipse periods, the panels produce no power. I did a bit of research into the capacity of ISS's Solar Arrays and found that it takes 9,600 square feet of solar panel to provide an average of 78,000 watts. A KW or so would amount to a couple percent of the station's capacity, and could probably be spared for emergencies. The panels themselves deteriorate as they become bombarded by micrometeorites, etc, so output drops over time.
Rigging the station for survival mode to slow orbit decay may very well mean pointing the panels edge-on in the direction of travel, sacrificing power production by about half.
Using a gasoline generator analogy, I burn about 1 liter of gasoline an hour to generate about 2,000 watts of electricity with my typical portable gasoline powered generator here on earth. A fuel cell will be more efficient, by perhaps a factor of 3, but it will need to consume both oxidizing agents as well as fuel. To run a fuel cell for a month at 1KW, it will consume on the order of about a ton of fuel and oxidizers in order to generate that much electricity on a sustained basis. This fuel will have to be rocketed into space and stored. LOX containers are heavy and bulky in their own right, and depending on the fuel, the fuel storage containers are quite considerable in bulk and weight as well.
While diesel engines do not have the advantage of shutting off like Hybrids, they do not suffer the inefficiencies of pumping losses that conventional gasoline engines do at idle because they do not have to close their throttle plates. These characteristics tend to offset one another, and is why diesel engines have found their way into most school busses and delivery vehicles built today.
I think the real reason diesels and their hybrid derivatives are lagging in this country is all the bad press the GM diesels got in the early '80s. The problem was the fact that GM did a half-ass conversion of a gasoline V-8 engine, which just wasn't up to the job of handling the high compression and stresses of a diesel engine. Consumers were expecting an engine with the durability of an engine designed as a diesel from the ground up, such as the Mercedes 240D or the engines in large trucks, which go up to a half-million miles between overhauls. Instead, they got a diesel engine which clattered like a diesel, smelled like a diesel, and accelerated like a diesel, but usually self-destructed well before 100,000 miles.
My Dad actually had 2 GM diesels as company cars. He was sort of a diesel car enthusiast, worked in the diesel engine business, and had previously owned a string of Mercedes Benz Diesels before getting the GM diesels in the early '80s. I learned to drive in one of them, a '74 Mercedes 240D. The 240D was one of the slowest cars you could buy in that era, with 0-60 times of about 20 seconds and a top speed just over 80 MPH, but it was pretty much dead reliable and was still going strong at 130,000 miles when he sold it. It also got about 26 miles a gallon when comparably sized American cars got about 16 mpg. The GM diesels, OTOH, did even better in the mileage department. I remember Dad saying that the big Delta 88 got 30 MPG on the highway, almost as good as my Plymouth Horizon at the time. Like the experience of many of the GM diesel owners, my Dad had major mechanical issues with both his '81 Delta 88 and '84 Riviera before they even reached 50,000 miles. There was great potential for the diesel engine in American cars, but GM's quality problems with its diesel engines sealed their fate.
My dad gave up on diesel cars, but he had a Cummins powered Dodge pickup 3 years before they were available to the public. He converted a '78 Dodge pickup to take a B-series 4 cylinder turbodiesel that had 10,000 hours on it as a prototype test engine in 1985. It was a brute to drive but it was tough as nails, and the engine outlasted the rest of the truck. In 1989 he gave that truck to my brother in law and brought a brand new 6 cylinder Cummins Dodge 3/4 ton pickup. It gets 22 MPG on the highway and he still has it 17 years later. Maybe I will inherit it one day.
The point is, the failure of the early GM diesels caused the domestic automakers to shy away from diesel engines in their passenger vehicles. Falling gas prices after their 1981 peak, rising expectations for performance, and electronic engine controls breathed improved performance and efficiency into the old gasoline engines. Until the recent run-up in fuel prices, Detroit has had little incentive to revisit the diesel engine in passenger cars and other light-duty vehicles.
OTOH, the Big 3 automakers have had good success selling diesel engines in their 3/4 ton and larger pickup trucks, vans, busses, and delivery vehicles that typically had gasoline engines a generation ago. These types of vehicles really suck down the gas in their gasoline versions, so the efficiency gains of the diesel engines are more compelling. The engines themselves in especially the first generation of 3/4 ton diesel pickups were built by companies respected for building quality diesel engines, and the truckmakers often advertised this fact. Cummins, Caterpillar, and International Harvester engines were under the hoods of Dodge and Ford trucks. GM took great pains to emphasise that its diesel engines were designed from the ground up as truck engines, and it took a long time for GM's truck diesels to shake the stigma that they were left with from their passenger car diesels.
As difficult as it is to think about abandoning New Orleans, the grim reality is this:
1. Almost the entire city is inundated. Except for some tall and modern downtown buildings, most of the residential areas are going to be not worth salvaging,they will have to be rebuilt from scratch, even if the city is pumped dry. These buildings will be soaking the the fetid stew of stagnant polluted water for weeks, if not months. Anything made of wood will be turned to mulch.
2. Most of the major highways that serve the city are heavily damaged. It will take many months, if not years to reconnect the city properly to the rest of the world, and cost billions of dollars.
3. Same can be said for the other infrastructure, such as water, sewer, electrical, and communications infrastructure.
4. Even if the downtown high-rises are relatively unscathed (and most have pretty serious glass breakage) who will stay in the area to work in them or occupy them.
5. The levee system needs extensive repairs to hold back even another tropical storm or category one hurricane. It is not unreasonable to expect another tropical cyclone to form in the gulf and affect that part of the coast before repairs can be completed.
6. Even if the levees are reinforced against another Category 4/5 hurricane, New Orleans faces other threats to its viability as a city. Upriver, the Mississippii River is held back by huge dikes to prevent it from finding a new route to the sea. Someday, these defenses will be overwhelmed, and Old Man River will take a shortcut to the west, abandoning its current channel, cutting off New Orleans and the water flow that keeps its shipping channels clear.
To abandon New Orleans would mean abandoning over 400 years of tradition, history, and a unique and quirky culture unlike anywhere else in the country. Without a vision to keep the survivors in the region, most likely they would disperse throughout the rest of the country, as the article noted. The geography of the area provides no easy answers, there is not a whole lot of good buildable land that can be used to build a new city nearby, but there are better locations to build than the current location.
Perhaps it is the Sim City enthusiast in me, but perhaps the destruction of New Orleans would give us a chance to rebuild a city from scratch, and avoid some of the mistakes that were made in the original town. It would be a mistake as well though, to rebuild New Orleans in the same sterile and souless style as many modern suburbs are, as it would be to try to rebuild an exact replica of it upriver somewhere.
Many, if not most rural towns have a local institution known as a diner, which for slightly more than the price of a Mocha Grande at Starbucks will give you a drinkable cup of Colombian coffee, with free refills. As a bonus, you will also be served a plate with two eggs, toast, home fries, sausage, and a glass of orange juice, all served up by a friendly waitress named Flo. You will have to get used to the fact that many of the patrons will be wearing designer baseball caps imprinted with the logoes of John Deere, Caterpillar, Peterbilt, and Mack.
Oh, they were trumpeting the sum of $750,000,000,000 as the loss to our economy from wasting time at the watercooler or surfing/. at work. I spend much of my time in a standby mode as an onsite service tech, and the customer couldn't be happier when I am curled up to a good game of Tetris while the equipment I maintain is running smoothly, pumping out the work. It is when I am running around frantically from one machine to another or looking for parts, or working late into the evening struggling with a down machine. that has worked backing up that I am wasting the customer's time and dragging down production. As I work smarter, the boss gives me more to do, but much of my value to the customer lies in my ability to get things running again quickly. I do have some metrics to meet, such as performing required maintenance of the equipment and maintaining a proper inventory of parts and tools. If I spread myself too thin, maintenance gets skipped, the equipment starts to degrade and break down, and I end up spending more time running around than actually keeping things running. More importantly to our customers, the downtime costs them real money, rather than a perceived overpaying for service.
This is true in many environments: The loss of a critical machine costs more than keeping the extra service people around to respond quickly to problems. This is true in remittance processing, bakeries, automobile factories, and of course important computer networks. When the machine or system is down, often dozens of people are forced to remain idle until it is fixed.
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The same principle applies to auto mechanics. I am one of the few and proud that still seems to take pride in being able to work on their own ride, partly for financial reasons, partly for the challenge of it, and partly to make sure it is done right. It seems like every project lately means a trip to buy at least one special tool or another. An angle grinder for my rusty bumper, a MAPP torch to build a luggage rack for my Magna, a heavy-duty floor jack to lift the frame of my old '93 F-150 to replace the rusty spring brackets, and a special socket I needed to replace the rotors on my "new" '94 4WD F-150, to name a few.
In every case the cost of the tools was still a fraction of the cost of labor and parts markup I would have paid to a mechanic, and the new tools encourage me to tackle more challenging repairs. Often these tools have uses I couldn't have dreamed of when I brought them.
If you expect the axe to fall in a few months, you might have time to fatten up the checking account by cutting back or delaying expenditures but certain things will always get you, as certain as the grass will grow, such as:
Car Expenses: Waiting to get that odd noise or that check engine light dealt with can leave you stranded on the way to a job interview, and stuck with a big towing and repair bill. Learn to do your own car maintenance, and have some basic tools. Fixing worn stuff before it leaves you stranded will save you lots of money and grief in the long run. The last 10 percent of the tread of a tire is worth about the cost of a McDonald's lunch, but a flat on the side of I-695 at rush hour with a busted jack and a flat spare will cost you more than a brand new set of tires. Same goes for brakes, belts, hoses, and driveline stuff like U-joints and CV Axles.
Getting Car Stuff fixed in a timely manner is good, but being able to do it yourself is even better. You often get the "mechanic's price" for the part, but for repairs that can be done in your driveway or garage in an afternoon or less, you also avoid the hassle of having to drop off, wait for, or lose the use of your car for the day. In tough times, a reliable car that is in good repair is an asset, even if it is older, a car prone to breakdown is a potential liability.
The same principle goes with stuff around the house. A drip around the water heater will soon turn into a flooded basement if not dealt with in a timely manner. Some basic plumbing and electrical knowledge and a $200 water heater from Lowes can hold off a $500 plumbers bill and thousands of dollars worth of ruined carpets and appliances from a flooded basement.
Don't forget to consider your own skills and talents as assets to be built up. Investing all your time and energy in uber-specialized skills might make you a highly sought-after guru for a while, that is, until that uber-specialty is rendered obsolete, or a whole bunch of people get the certification in that specialty. I've seen the hot specialty in IT go from FORTRAN/COBOL to PASCAL to System Analyst to Novell to MCSE to Java, etc. I have certainly missed a few other hot IT careers that have come and gone, but I am stll about only midway through my working life. Having a variety of skills gives you vocational alternatives, but makes you a more interesting person besides, which leads to my final point:
Perhaps your greatest asset of all, but perhaps the most intangible as well, is your relationships with your friends, family, and coworkers. The isolated workaholic has to buy everything he needs from the "regular" economy at list price. For example, he has to store his extra stuff at Public Storage for $100 a month for a closet-sized warehouse. A person who is well connected will have friends or family with extra space in their attic who will store it for free, in exchange for help fixing their motorcycle, computer, or painting their bedroom. It is best to build up these favors in advance by giving freely of yourself, and expecting no immediate and specific return. By being willing to store a friend's stuff if you have the room, he will probably find some way to return the favor, such as an enjoyable evening out, an extra ticket to a sold-out concert, or maybe an introduction to a wonderful young lady to which you might cultivate a long and mutually beneficial relationship with.
We are using new forms at work to take advantage of ICR or Intelligent Character Recognition Software for our service reports. Each letter is entered into little boxes. The reports are then scanned, gaps are filled by a data entry clerk, then we are emailed an electronic "grade" by the software, based on the percentage of fields that were machine readable. With reasonable care, most of the guys can get the machine to resolve 80 to 90 percent of the fields. Of course it slows down how fast we can fill out our service reports, so in the end I wonder how much time they really save.
According to the Wiki article I referenced, MICR has an error rate of about 1 in 20,000 checks. This does deserve a bit of explanation though. As someone who works as a technician with modern check processing equipment, I can say that an error rate of 1 in 20,000 does not mean that a MICR or OCR system can successfully read 19,999 out of 20,000 checks fed into the machine. This is the rate that the MICR will read one account number and mistake it for another. In reality, the typical Magnetic MICR can read about 96 or 97 percent. If the MICR comes across an unreadable MICR character, it will reject that item. The Account Numbers and Routing Transit numbers on the MICR line of a check are also set up so that a checksum can be performed on the sum of the digits on the MICR line and verify that the information is valid. Inconsistencies in printing can affect MICR as it does OCR, but the fact that the data is printed in magnetic ink and read magnetically mean that stray marks from customers signatures, check decorations etc. do not adversely affect the readability of the information.
The typical account information line printed at the bottom of your typical credit card statement or utility bill is printed in a font known as OCR-A. Equipment for machine reading this type of font has been around for over 25 years, such as some of the old Banctec 4300 series workstations used for processing bill payments and checks. Even these 1970s era machines had better than a 95 percent read rate of the entire account information line, provided that the printing was clear and properly placed. Later machines, such as the NCR 7780 or the OPEX Eagle can have better than a 99 percent read rate of a full line of characters. Again, the usual limitations on reliability of OCR characters are a result of poor or mislocated printing, or stray marks in the OCR field. Here is the obligatory Wikipedia link if you interested in finding out a bit more about the history of Optical Character Recognition.
MICR fonts, which are those funny looking numbers printed in magnetic ink at the bottom of most checks are designed to be human recognizable but machine readable, and have been around since the '60s. OCRA typically beats MICR today, but a good MICR line is still readable over 95 percent of the time.
Handwritten fonts are the most difficult to read, but the technology has been available to read handwritten numbers and letters for over 10 years, but typical read rates for something like a handwritten zip code or the numerical amount written on a check range from 60 to 80 percent, and are slowly getting better. Again, a lot depends on how much care is taken when writing out the text, and what kind of background clutter is present.
As for me, I typed out school reports in 8th grade in 1973, when our family's word processing hardware consisted of a 1940's vintage Underwood typewriter. Even humans had difficulty decoding my handwriting!
With much fanfare, Maryland's new E-voting sytem was unveiled to the public at a cost of tens of millions of dollars. This replaced an electronic system of paper ballots that were filled out like the op-scan forms used for so many surveys and standardized tests for the last 30 or 40 years. At least some privacy was provided to prevent others from seeing a completed form and being able to link it to a particular voter, and the voter himself or herself fed the form into the scanning machine. For the most part I liked this system, the paper forms provided annonymity, the advantages of electronic tabulation of results, and a built in ability to audit the results.
The new sytem had nice pretty touchscreen displays, smart cards to enable the machines, and the ability to review and change your choices before hitting the "Vote" button. The new system did not provide any kind of hard copy tabulation though, and I worry about what might happen to my vote in case a plug gets kicked out of the wall or lightning strikes the transformer outside the fire station where I vote. In the hands of inexperienced volunteers, would they think to put all the machines on UPSs? In my area, the polls at the local precinct are traditionally run by mostly retirees who volunteer for the job, not by IT guys who set up ATMs and the like. Under the old system, if a machine crashed and burned, you could just refeed the paper data into another machine and not lose a vote.
An area in both the old and new systems that had me concerned wasn't so much the technology of the voting systems, but the recordkeeping of eligible voters. In 2002, I lived in my grandmother's old house, had the same last name and found out that she was still in the registered voter database, despite that fact she had been dead for 5 years and had been out of the area for 10. I made a joke about voting for her, but also asked them to update their database. Having representatives of all interested political parties working at the polls usually keeps people honest, but I can imagine in certain precincts there could be no opposition party workers. Without anyone of the opposition party to watch over their shoulders, collusion could result in ballot box stuffing and other shenanigans. In a close race, a few hundred extra votes for one candidate or another could swing an election, and with that the political direction of an entire state or country.
Sometimes it can make sense to own two vehicles, especially if you drive a lot or live in the country. I own a "road warrior" vehicle, a 2000 Accord I brought new and drive almost 30,000 miles a year. It is comfortable and dependable, handles well, has good performance, and gets almost 30 mpg. It definitely has major issues hauling things like lumber, plywood, cow manure, etc, and has real trouble with deep snow.
Enter my other vehicle, a 12 year old 4WD F-150 with 180.000 miles on it that is hard to park, gets about 15 mpg, and drives like -- a truck. I only drive it 3 or 4 thousand miles a year, either when the snow seriously starts to fly, when I need a ton of gravel, organic fertilizer, or to haul a big load of stuff home from Home Depot. It also makes an adequate backup vehicle when my other car is in the shop, so I don't have to rent a car or pay a premium for someone who will fix it fast, when I could fix it myself given a little time and something to run around in in the meantime. Adequate pickups for second vehicle status can be had for a couple of thousand bucks or less.
The big thing that stinks about one person owning two vehicles is that the DMV and the insurance companies seem to think that you should pay almost as much for the second vehicle as the first even though you can only drive one at a time. Regrettably, there isn't much you do except pay cash for the old truck to avoid having to shell out for collision coverage.
This strategy works better out in the country, where parking is plentiful and insurance rates are lower. In more crowded urban areas, insurance and parking costs tend to make owning 2 vehicles a less attractive proposition.
I just got ticked off and used my "back" button. However IIRC, you needed to provide a valid email address to complete the registration process, leaving it open to spam. Time to reactivate my Hotmail account!
La Times and their "associates" want to spam and telemarket you even if you opt out of non-affiliates, and they still want your phone #, income, age, sex, address and other sensitive information. Why not just ask for my freaking SSN and bank statements!! Read their privacy policy!
Here is one way to think about this statement: If the local electricty is generated by burning oil/propane/gas, then by the time it reaches your TV set or computer, only about 40 percent at best of the original energy is left, the rest is dissapated in the turbines, the smokestacks, wastewater, and resistance losses in the transformers and power lines along the way. Modern oil or gas furnaces are 90% efficient or better, and just about anything less than 30 years old is 80 percent efficient if it has been maintained properly. Even if the local utility gets its boiler fuel at a bulk discount, it will cost them at least twice as much to generate the electrical energy as it would to get that same amount of heat by burning same fuel directly in your own furnace.
The relative economics of different types of energy sources can skew these calculations. In Central Maryland, electrical rates are relatively low (about 7 cents/Kwh) due to the fact that BGE generates much of its electricity with nuclear, coal, and hydroelectric sources. It is almost as cheap to turn on the electric stove than it is to run the gas furnace this winter. In other areas, electricity is running nearly twice the cost here, due to the fact that the utilities in those areas burn mostly oil and gas to generate their electricity.
Of course, generating heat by leaving electronics, as well as electric lights and appliances on in the summertime is doubly expensive. You not only pay for the electricity it takes to keep these things powered up, but you also pay the additional cost for the air conditioning to remove the excess heat from your living space. I am actually considering putting in an additional HVAC register in my computer room because it gets several degrees hotter than the rest of the house in summer. I will definitely need it if I want to set up some of my old tube-type ham gear again and want to stay comfortable in here during the warmer months of the year.
As long as we are getting off onto a tangent about salespeople versus technical types, I would like to add this observation from my many years in field service: A good tech always has a little bit of salesman in him. Even though I work in a business where most of our customers are covered under an all-inclusive service contract, it is often necessary to negotiate with the customer, either to arrange downtime to do maintenance or upgrades, or to investigate issues that are not immediately apparent and need time to resolve. Often there is a choice between doing a minimal repair or workaround that can be done quickly and get them back up and running, but not fully address the problem, or doing a major repair which may take several hours and cause major disruption to their operations.
Determining the optimal solution for a given situation requires not only technical knowledge, but knowledge of the the customer's wider operation as well. For example, if I find a bearing starting to fail on a peak workday, the optimal solution may very well be to squirt a little WD-40 into it every once in a while, then do a rebuild of the module after lunch, once the day's most important deadlines are past. On the other hand, if that same bearing starts to rumble the day before a long holiday weekend, the optimal solution may be to sell the customer on an immediate and thorough repair, despite the interruption to the customer's workflow in order to prevent downtime when service is expensive and possibly not immediately available.
A little technician's salemanship can also help make the salesperson's job easier as well. I will often do a little suggestive "selling" to a customer if I see a need that could be met by one of our products. I will mention it to the manager and call the sales staff to follow up. More sales = more work for us techs = job security.
The better the insulation, the greater effect thermal mass will have on your house. I recently had built a new modular house with Energy Star windows, R-30 in the ceiling, R-19 in the walls, and an R-6 Mylar faced insulating blanket on the basement walls extending from the joists to below the frostline, and am heating with a Trane high efficiency heatpump backed up by propane. Because of the good insulation, even if it is in the 20's outside, the temperature only drops a degree an hour or so if I turn back the thermostat. If you want to keep the house at 70 during the morning breakfast hours, cool at 60 when away, and 65 at night, the temperature does not really have an opportunity to settle at your programmed levels, at least not for very long. I have thought about getting a programmable thermostat, but I am lazy and just keep the house at 70 all the time, unless I am going to be away for a couple of days or more.
Keeping the house at a constant temperature has advantages in itself. Because of the lag in warming the walls, floors, etc. compared to the air, keeping the temperature at a constant compromise setting insures that those surfaces you touch feel warm as well. If the air is 72 degrees, but your desk is 65, you will have cold hands, and that isn't even talking about how cold the bathroom floor feels at night after cutting back the heat. By the time the floor, counters, and desk are warm, you are well onto your way to work.
The house itself also tends to benefit from constant temperature as well. I found out the hard way that temperature swings can make drywall crack after I heated the house back up after cutting the heat back to 50 when I went away for several days. Frequent temperature variations also start to work loose fasteners such as nails and screws as well, and can eventually result in squeaky floors, cracked grout, and nail pops in drywall as well.
Because of the improvements in windows, doors, heating systems, and insulation built into newer houses, my new house has about half the energy cost of my old 1946 vintage farmhouse, despite being 20 percent larger and built on the same windswept hill as my old house. One thing that is important when doing major energy efficiency upgrades to insulation and windows is to optimize the heating system for the new heat loss characteristics of the house. Just as a big pickup truck needs a V-8 to move it along as well as a Civic with a 4 banger, a house with major improvements to doors, windows, and insulation will be able to get by with a smaller furnace as well. If you are replacing an oil furnace with another, keep this in mind if you have the opportunity to replace the furnace. If the furnace has been recently replaced, you might still be able to tweak some things like nozzle size, fuel pressure, etc. to optimize what you have.
Another thing to consider if the furnace is on the "to do" list is to investigate Geothermal Heat Pumps . They are not for everyone, and the capital investment can have a fairly long payback period, but if you are blessed with suitable soil, a large enough lot, or a nearby body of water, they can cut your heating and air conditioning bills to a fraction of the cost of heating with oil or other fossil fuels. I made the decision not to go with the Geothermal heat pump because of the extra cost and a rapidly tightening construction budget, but with the recent increases in the price of propane and looming increases in electricity, it is one decision I might have reconsidered.
Not even that works, just look at all the hooha that is being made about Yucca Mountain . It is located in one of the most bleak and god forsaken corners of this country, and is almost 2 hours north of Las Vegas, in the middle of the Nevada Nuclear Test Range. Despite its remote location, suitability for long-term waste storage, and the billions already and yet to be spent to insure safe operation on a scale of thousands of years, it is still not good enough in the eyes of nuclear power's detractors.
Mass and tire grip are important, but another important factor is the ratio of sprung to unsprung weight. Sprung weight usually includes the engine, body, parts of the driveline and passengers. Unsprung weight includes the wheels, tires, brakes, and parts of the suspension below the springs. One of the reasons sports cars handle so well is that their unsprung weight is low. Cars with a lightweight independent suspension have relatively low unsprung weight compared to a 4 wheel drive pickup with solid differentials.
When the supsension hits a dip or bump, the less mass the suspension has compared to the body, the less effect the body has on the suspension's ability to conform to the road, and the less the bumps on the road affect the stability of the body.
A lot of electrons are being thrown around about how sales tax is giving internet retailers an 'unfair advantage' compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. I ended up splitting my money roughly evenly between Amazon and their ilk, and their brick and mortar equivalents. Even with roughly equal prices, the internet stores allow the customer to avoid a major costly, time consuming, and stressful part of holiday shopping: the trip to the mall. If you figure the cost of car operation, and the time wasted driving, parking, walking past stores you won't patronize, and the aches and pains of shlepping all those packages around, sales tax barely registers. People are realizing that avoiding much of the hassle is valuable in itself.
On the other hand, when I finally broke down and went to the local Mega Mall and went into the Books a Million to get a few fill-in gifts, I was surprised by how much being able to scan a large number of titles in a very short time was helpful in selecting gifts for hard to buy for relatives. While Amazon has their suggestive selling algorithms to suggest related information, seeing a book out of the corner of my eye frequently had me saying K--- would like this or TR would like that. It just isn't possible to present that kind of information as completely online as it is in a brick and mortar environment.
Spinoffs are a way of forcing the now independent business units to survive on their own merits. Often money losing divisions are spun off and allowed to lapse into bankruptcy or liquidation, rather than continuing to be a drain on the parent company's profits. The first time I remember this, I was a vendor for the former Wal-Mart wannabee Woolco, which was a 300 store chain that was part of F.W. Woolworth into the early '80s. I remember the old timers seeing this as a bad omen when they were spun off from their parent. Sure enough, 2 months later they held their going out of business sale. In this case everybody loses their job.
On the other hand, spinning off a troubled division can free it from the meddling, interference and bad decisions of a parent company that is out of touch with the soul of the division being spun off. One of the most famous examples of this was Harley-Davidson. Harley-Davidson became part of AMF Corporation during the diversification frenzy of the 1960s and 1970s. AMF ran everything from machine tools to bowling alley equipment to sporting goods. Harley-Davidson motorcycles were just another product to be manufactured, and their desirability and quality hit an all-time low during this era. They had been pretty much run into the ground by the time they were spun off, but the new company (with a little help from tarriffs on large Japanese motorcycles) was able to turn things around, and their bikes now sell at large premiums compared to comparable Japanese models, and they own nearly half of the domestic market for motorcycles.
Finally, the economies of reduced overhead for administrative functions by a small business being absorbed by a larger one are often disappointing, due to the cost of integrating information systems, manufacturing and distribution facilities, and the culture clash between organizations that takes place during mergers. In recent years I have stood by as the banking business has undergone wave after wave of consolidations and mergers. On the operational level, it takes years to sort out everything from management structure to what equipment they should retain, move, buy, or sell. Many of my customers have seen the name on their buildings change several times, but they are pretty much the same bunch of people doing the same type of work they have always done. In the meantime, an organizational paralysis often sets in as employees and managers worry more about how they will fit into the new organization instead of building the business.
Going the other way and spinning off a division gives the new company the freedom to select the types of services, equipment, people, and structure that are appropriate for the size and type of business they are in. There might still be some duplication of a few things, but the smaller organization does not need for instance, the large and complex systems that large organizations do.
Yeah, I ride too, and I wear my helmet. Seriously, what about people who suffer crippling brain injuries, along with other "mentally challenged" individuals, habitual felons, the physically deformed and other "undesirables? Do they get treatments? For how long? Who decides? Do we want to be keeping millions of Terry Schiavos alive for hundreds of years? Do we allow "nature to take its course" with certain designated classes. Do only the rich or well-connected get to take treatments? I fear the type of world this will lead to.
Recycled asphalt paving is worth about $5/ton to the local asphalt plant here in MD. Not a lot of money, and it is cheaper than the aggregate stone it is mostly made from, but it is worthwhile to grind it off the road even at that price. 5 dollars a ton is better than paying a landfill to take it, because in many cases it is necessary to remove the worn, cracked and rutted asphalt anyway in order to maintain proper road grades, overpass clearances, and so on.
I purchased about 100 tons of the stuff directly from the haulers which would otherwise haul it back to the asphalt plant while a nearby road was resurfaced recently. I used the asphalt grindings as an alternative to Crusher Run (raw gravel out of the rock crushers at the quarry) as a paving material for my piece of a private road that serves several houses besides mine. Unlike the local limestone, it won't get quickly ground into dust, but will sort of knit back into asphalt by traffic on a hot day. Us country folks jump at the chance to get it, particularly at wholesale prices. The only disadvantage is that some of it was lumpy, where chunks of pavement are picked up somewhat intact, but I used those where I needed to fill holes or build up an area.
Back at the asphalt plant, the grindings are mixed with fresh aggregate, and a mixture of new asphalt "juice" and lighter petroleum fractions. When they first experimented with asphalt recycling, the old asphalt would melt and lay down just fine but would soon crack. This was because as time goes on, the lighter oils that were mixed in with the original asphalt acted like a plasticizer and evaporated, leaving the pavement brittle.
Though the parent was modded funny, there is a lot of truth in that sage comment. At present time, the average person in the first world has about an annual lifetime risk of dying due to accidental trauma in the range from 1 in 500 to about 1 in 1000. People who work in certain professions/occupations have a higher risk as well. Infantrymen in Iraq might have an annual risk of violent death of about 1 percent, but people who work as commercial fishermen, in construction trades, drive trucks, or work as policemen or firemen also face above average risks as well.
Another factor not to be discounted lightly is the risk of disabling injuries. I saw few if any grey heads working on the roof of my recently constructed house in the crew of about 8 or 9 guys out there. People tend to abandon risky occupations as they get older if they can, either they suffer physically disabling injuries themselves, or see enough of their friends get hurt that they decide to find a safer way to make a living. Even as lifespans have increased by the relatively modest amounts over the last 50 years or so, one of the biggest problems will be finding help to put new roofs on their houses, take down overgrown trees, etc.
If life spans increase 10 fold, the amount of dangerous work will not go down that much, but the pool of people willing to do that kind of work will diminish to nearly the vanishing point. If people live to be 1,000, occupations such as truck drivers, roofers, cops, and many of the construction trades will either be a death sentence, or something that most people will be unable to do for more than a few decades before being disabled or forced to seek safer employment. People may become too risk-averse for society to function.
Just a thought: Generating a KW of electricity to keep ISS in orbit will require solar panels, or enough fuel on board to keep a generator or fuel cell going. Having dabbled in Amateur Satellites, the most precious thing aboard a satellite is power. Based on reasonably current solar technology available at my local marine store, it takes about a square foot of solar panel to generate just 10 watts. To generate a thousand, it would take a solar panel the size of three sheets of plywood. In the vacuum of space the output would be higher, and NASA might use more efficient panels, but during eclipse periods, the panels produce no power. I did a bit of research into the capacity of ISS's Solar Arrays and found that it takes 9,600 square feet of solar panel to provide an average of 78,000 watts. A KW or so would amount to a couple percent of the station's capacity, and could probably be spared for emergencies. The panels themselves deteriorate as they become bombarded by micrometeorites, etc, so output drops over time.
Rigging the station for survival mode to slow orbit decay may very well mean pointing the panels edge-on in the direction of travel, sacrificing power production by about half.
Using a gasoline generator analogy, I burn about 1 liter of gasoline an hour to generate about 2,000 watts of electricity with my typical portable gasoline powered generator here on earth. A fuel cell will be more efficient, by perhaps a factor of 3, but it will need to consume both oxidizing agents as well as fuel. To run a fuel cell for a month at 1KW, it will consume on the order of about a ton of fuel and oxidizers in order to generate that much electricity on a sustained basis. This fuel will have to be rocketed into space and stored. LOX containers are heavy and bulky in their own right, and depending on the fuel, the fuel storage containers are quite considerable in bulk and weight as well.
While diesel engines do not have the advantage of shutting off like Hybrids, they do not suffer the inefficiencies of pumping losses that conventional gasoline engines do at idle because they do not have to close their throttle plates. These characteristics tend to offset one another, and is why diesel engines have found their way into most school busses and delivery vehicles built today.
I think the real reason diesels and their hybrid derivatives are lagging in this country is all the bad press the GM diesels got in the early '80s. The problem was the fact that GM did a half-ass conversion of a gasoline V-8 engine, which just wasn't up to the job of handling the high compression and stresses of a diesel engine. Consumers were expecting an engine with the durability of an engine designed as a diesel from the ground up, such as the Mercedes 240D or the engines in large trucks, which go up to a half-million miles between overhauls. Instead, they got a diesel engine which clattered like a diesel, smelled like a diesel, and accelerated like a diesel, but usually self-destructed well before 100,000 miles.
My Dad actually had 2 GM diesels as company cars. He was sort of a diesel car enthusiast, worked in the diesel engine business, and had previously owned a string of Mercedes Benz Diesels before getting the GM diesels in the early '80s. I learned to drive in one of them, a '74 Mercedes 240D. The 240D was one of the slowest cars you could buy in that era, with 0-60 times of about 20 seconds and a top speed just over 80 MPH, but it was pretty much dead reliable and was still going strong at 130,000 miles when he sold it. It also got about 26 miles a gallon when comparably sized American cars got about 16 mpg. The GM diesels, OTOH, did even better in the mileage department. I remember Dad saying that the big Delta 88 got 30 MPG on the highway, almost as good as my Plymouth Horizon at the time. Like the experience of many of the GM diesel owners, my Dad had major mechanical issues with both his '81 Delta 88 and '84 Riviera before they even reached 50,000 miles. There was great potential for the diesel engine in American cars, but GM's quality problems with its diesel engines sealed their fate.
My dad gave up on diesel cars, but he had a Cummins powered Dodge pickup 3 years before they were available to the public. He converted a '78 Dodge pickup to take a B-series 4 cylinder turbodiesel that had 10,000 hours on it as a prototype test engine in 1985. It was a brute to drive but it was tough as nails, and the engine outlasted the rest of the truck. In 1989 he gave that truck to my brother in law and brought a brand new 6 cylinder Cummins Dodge 3/4 ton pickup. It gets 22 MPG on the highway and he still has it 17 years later. Maybe I will inherit it one day.
The point is, the failure of the early GM diesels caused the domestic automakers to shy away from diesel engines in their passenger vehicles. Falling gas prices after their 1981 peak, rising expectations for performance, and electronic engine controls breathed improved performance and efficiency into the old gasoline engines. Until the recent run-up in fuel prices, Detroit has had little incentive to revisit the diesel engine in passenger cars and other light-duty vehicles.
OTOH, the Big 3 automakers have had good success selling diesel engines in their 3/4 ton and larger pickup trucks, vans, busses, and delivery vehicles that typically had gasoline engines a generation ago. These types of vehicles really suck down the gas in their gasoline versions, so the efficiency gains of the diesel engines are more compelling. The engines themselves in especially the first generation of 3/4 ton diesel pickups were built by companies respected for building quality diesel engines, and the truckmakers often advertised this fact. Cummins, Caterpillar, and International Harvester engines were under the hoods of Dodge and Ford trucks. GM took great pains to emphasise that its diesel engines were designed from the ground up as truck engines, and it took a long time for GM's truck diesels to shake the stigma that they were left with from their passenger car diesels.
As difficult as it is to think about abandoning New Orleans, the grim reality is this:
1. Almost the entire city is inundated. Except for some tall and modern downtown buildings, most of the residential areas are going to be not worth salvaging,they will have to be rebuilt from scratch, even if the city is pumped dry. These buildings will be soaking the the fetid stew of stagnant polluted water for weeks, if not months. Anything made of wood will be turned to mulch.
2. Most of the major highways that serve the city are heavily damaged. It will take many months, if not years to reconnect the city properly to the rest of the world, and cost billions of dollars.
3. Same can be said for the other infrastructure, such as water, sewer, electrical, and communications infrastructure.
4. Even if the downtown high-rises are relatively unscathed (and most have pretty serious glass breakage) who will stay in the area to work in them or occupy them.
5. The levee system needs extensive repairs to hold back even another tropical storm or category one hurricane. It is not unreasonable to expect another tropical cyclone to form in the gulf and affect that part of the coast before repairs can be completed.
6. Even if the levees are reinforced against another Category 4/5 hurricane, New Orleans faces other threats to its viability as a city. Upriver, the Mississippii River is held back by huge dikes to prevent it from finding a new route to the sea. Someday, these defenses will be overwhelmed, and Old Man River will take a shortcut to the west, abandoning its current channel, cutting off New Orleans and the water flow that keeps its shipping channels clear.
To abandon New Orleans would mean abandoning over 400 years of tradition, history, and a unique and quirky culture unlike anywhere else in the country. Without a vision to keep the survivors in the region, most likely they would disperse throughout the rest of the country, as the article noted. The geography of the area provides no easy answers, there is not a whole lot of good buildable land that can be used to build a new city nearby, but there are better locations to build than the current location.
Perhaps it is the Sim City enthusiast in me, but perhaps the destruction of New Orleans would give us a chance to rebuild a city from scratch, and avoid some of the mistakes that were made in the original town. It would be a mistake as well though, to rebuild New Orleans in the same sterile and souless style as many modern suburbs are, as it would be to try to rebuild an exact replica of it upriver somewhere.
Many, if not most rural towns have a local institution known as a diner, which for slightly more than the price of a Mocha Grande at Starbucks will give you a drinkable cup of Colombian coffee, with free refills. As a bonus, you will also be served a plate with two eggs, toast, home fries, sausage, and a glass of orange juice, all served up by a friendly waitress named Flo. You will have to get used to the fact that many of the patrons will be wearing designer baseball caps imprinted with the logoes of John Deere, Caterpillar, Peterbilt, and Mack.
Oh, they were trumpeting the sum of $750,000,000,000 as the loss to our economy from wasting time at the watercooler or surfing /. at work. I spend much of my time in a standby mode as an onsite service tech, and the customer couldn't be happier when I am curled up to a good game of Tetris while the equipment I maintain is running smoothly, pumping out the work. It is when I am running around frantically from one machine to another or looking for parts, or working late into the evening struggling with a down machine. that has worked backing up that I am wasting the customer's time and dragging down production. As I work smarter, the boss gives me more to do, but much of my value to the customer lies in my ability to get things running again quickly. I do have some metrics to meet, such as performing required maintenance of the equipment and maintaining a proper inventory of parts and tools. If I spread myself too thin, maintenance gets skipped, the equipment starts to degrade and break down, and I end up spending more time running around than actually keeping things running. More importantly to our customers, the downtime costs them real money, rather than a perceived overpaying for service.
This is true in many environments: The loss of a critical machine costs more than keeping the extra service people around to respond quickly to problems. This is true in remittance processing, bakeries, automobile factories, and of course important computer networks. When the machine or system is down, often dozens of people are forced to remain idle until it is fixed.