Homicide in common law jurisdictions (which includes Canada) requires the presence of mens rea [wikipedia.org], better known as intent. Can you get inside this kid's head and say that he wanted someone to die? Because that's the burden you'd need to meet to convict him of attempted homicide.
Felony murder rule would mean that if any of the SWAT officers pulled a trigger and killed somebody, the kid would be guilty of murder.
Though I agree, it's probably a high bar for most prosecutors to reach for. Felony endangerment charges, reckless disregard for somebody's life, that's much more accessible.
In my book, the objective is to catch these guys consistently enough, and provide a serious enough sentence, that nobody else thinks it is a good idea.
I think this can't be stated enough. When it comes to punishment as a deterrent, consistency is of far greater concern than the amount.
If the result of SWATTING was an immediate bucket of ice water over the head of the offender and his computer*, odds are nobody would do it twice, the word would spread, and most wouldn't do it even the first time.
More so than a 1% catch rate all punished by a decade in prison.
*destroying the computer, in this instance, even if it's in a case that would normally protect it sufficiently from a sudden deluge of ice water.
MITM at the gateway/proxy. This is mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley act [wikipedia.org] in the US, and is likely imposed by US corporations in other jurisdictions.
Do you have a better source than wikipedia on this? Reading through the act I saw no such requirement. I understand that the act imposes a lot of requirements on public businesses, but requiring MITM decryption at the gateway/proxy isn't listed as a requirement or even as an enabler to help with other requirements.
I do the same thing. All I can say is 'get a couple more credit cards or ask the companies to increase your limits'. While the applications would be a short term hit to your credit, long term you would improve your score by having a lower debt:limit ratio.
Statistics wise, with only 10 launches the system could really have up to a 10% failure rate and 0 failures in 10 would be a perfectly reasonable result.
They may be self-insuring (getting lower launch costs by not requiring insurance - maybe the launch is $150M insured).
This was my thought. Rocket launches are risky, so any insurance is going to be expensive.
So let's say they require commercial insurance to be bought, and the insurance company correctly predicts a 5% failure rate. But they have expenses to cover, the insurance is 'unusual' and highly variable, it's a small market, etc....
Just to break even, they would have to charge 1/20th the cost per launch, but that's not the end of it. They have expenses and profit to worry about. For something like rocket launches? 20% overhead wouldn't be out of line, I think.
So rather than the 'insurance' cost per launch being 5%, it's now 6%. For a $100M launch, that means self covering costs, on average, $5M. Commercial insurance would increase that to $6M.
As far as identity theft? My wife's hospital bills shoved us into Chapter 13 (one year left - yay!), so good luck with that...
Depends on the form of the identity theft. Not all of it is tied to credit today.
Some alternatives: Medical: They get hold of enough information, they bill your insurance for bogus procedures. Works best for patients on Medicare. Drugs: Variant on the medical. Fake up a prescription for you, utilize online pharmacy to get pills. Tax: Submit a bogus tax refund application the moment it's possible, long before you get around to it. Then you find yourself being questioned by the IRS as to why you claimed 15 dependents, and the precise amount of income to qualify for the maximum earned income credit...
Thing is, some card companies don't report your carried balance - they report how much you were carrying on X date. So if you simply bought 'a lot' of stuff that month, it could affect your score.
Alternatively something that had been improving your score, such as a paid off loan, might have aged to the point that it doesn't count as much(or any) anymore, thus no longer providing that boost.
Final option is that the company tweaked it's formulas. They do that regularly.
Yes. Many times. And my search results always show plenty of different ways that 100% renewable is possible, today (by today I mean existing technology, not the time to implement obviously).
Okay, I think I see where the issue is. While slashdot has it's own idiots, I think that it would be a relatively rare slashdotter that would disagree that we have the technology such that we could provide effectively 100% of our electricity needs via renewable sources.
I certainly think it's technically possible. But once you take a step back and look at the resources it would take to do so, the cost is the disallowing factor. Thus why I was careful to put 'economically' in my post, and I'll admit that I don't always remember it.
Back when it would have cost $120k to replace $1200 worth of electricity a year, it was technically possible, but economical suicide, to go with PV panels for electricity. Back then batteries cost so much, and degraded so quickly, that the wear on the batteries exceeded the cost of the electricity to fill them. As a result, they were very much special purpose devices used in remote areas.
But with the cost of that solar array having dropped to under $20k, with LiIon dropping drastically in price even as their lifespan increased(at least in large battery packs with charge management systems that treat them 'properly'), as I mentioned, the economics are changing.
Here is even a group that worked with scientists, engineers, etc.. to come up with 50 customized plans for 100% renewable energy for all 50 states. http://thesolutionsproject.org...
Noticeably lacking: cost estimates for the infrastructure - found it in their 'more information', but it's buried in a spreadsheet. For example - they propose putting PV on 54% of residental rooftops up here in Alaska(Table 4), but only anticipate it providing 0.2% of our power needs. Table 6 shows that it'd cost $1k per person per year in climate-change 'benefits'. It'd cost the state over $1B(table 8).
Expanded cost results by state - $119B to change over, for the state of Alaska. That's 'only' $161k per person.
Funny: They show replacing a fuel burning truck with a 2 seat EV. I'm a single guy in Alaska. I wouldn't last a week in that thing in the winter. Though I do want to see a EV/Strong hybrid truck.
They also somehow figure we'd use 40% less energy by switching to electricity everywhere. Doing that would essentially require rebuilding 90% of our homes. I mean, I want a dome-home, but I can't afford to build one right now.
Finally, I'll toss your 'claiming it' back at you. Just change #4 to 'paid shills of renewable energy'. I support more renewable energy, but don't think we can afford to reach 100% anytime soon without major developments in the technology.
Heh - mythbusters, car on cliff tipped over by birds myth. We're at the point they've tossed a dozen chickens onto it. There's another dozen or so to go before the renewable energy truly tips over the cliff, but the mythbusters are getting impatient for their crash...
If they are following universal precautions, it won't matter if they are sick or not... (yes, I work in healthcare). If they don't know this, they are not doing the right things.
The 'universal precautions' would include not coming into work when ill, wouldn't it? I mean, as far as preventing disease transmission goes, just look at how many hospital workers end up catching ebola, despite far more serious efforts to prevent it.
As a doctor, you come in with the flu or something, just like anybody else you're likely giving it to your fellow employees and customers.
You know, I can't help but wonder, if you stuck a really, really high RPM drive on his machine whether you'd bust the concrete at the final stage or blow up the first gearbox stage first?
Or, assuming you put the fastest drive on the first stage that wouldn't blow it up, whether the concrete would weather away before being broken off?
and it need not have a ratio as high as 11 million to one.
Indeed, I think there's a difference that some posters here are missing between something that's a 'useful application' and a 'demonstration of concept'. The puzzle maker made a demonstration of concept. For one thing, I didn't see any provision to convert the final rotary piece into 'work' - IE turn or rotate something else. You would also need to figure out how to properly brace it. Still, when making your own it would be easy enough to do.
I'd be interested to know how much energy is wasted through the large number of gears, and how much relative stress is placed on each part.
Yeah, that's gotta be more efficient than overalls and a flannel shirt, riding a tractor in a field...
The places I'm thinking about humans don't go into much at all, most of it's robotic.
And while it's more expensive 'right now', consider the expense of growing crops in South America to ship up to the USA.
The economics of it is complex, to say the least. What it amounts to is that you're spending 200+ times as much per acre, but you're getting something like 100 times the productivity, lower shipping costs, and less ruined product by the time it reaches the stores.
What's that got to do with UI changes and user experience?
Don't know about the Therac, but I've read of a number of cases where poor user interfaces resulted in warnings being ignored and medicine being given improperly. Presumably in order to 'protect' themselves the company had every little possibility throw a warning, to the point that they didn't have a 'I really mean it this time!' warning. Stuff like administering around 50 times the intended dose of an antibiotic to a person.
I think what the Libertarians fail to realize is that farmers, as a general rule, are not smart enough to diversify or maintain course.
I tend to consider myself a moderate libertarian, but even I recognize that 'diversification' in this sense is expensive in that it wrecks your efficiency. As was mentioned earlier, a lot of the equipment that makes farming corn profitable even with lots of competition is extremely specialized for working with corn, but still freaking expensive, even if it can process tens, hundreds, or even millions of acres of corn a year. Seriously, some of those big harvesters are measured in acres harvested per minute.
Thus, in order to make a profit, you need to be as large and specialized as possible. The demand for staple crops - corn, wheat, rice, beans, and such is high enough to justify said investments year in and year out. It's a rather high amount of capital investment, so normally speaking you're only going to see fields expand at a limited pace year to year.
As a result, even 'diversifying' can kill your business as you're out-competed by the specialists.
On the other hand, having seen multiple meltdowns and supply shocks, I can tell you that I do NOT want to see this with food. It's bad enough that pork spikes because of some disease(last one I think was imported from China, killed 2/3rds of the piglets infected).
The problem is that while I'm philosophically against paying farmers not to farm, the situation is freaking complex, and any transition from the current situation to a more philosophically 'pure' one is going to have to be carefully planned. I can't give two shits about e-businesses, the housing market, or automobiles in the face of how bad a truly screwed we could be in a 'farming crash'. We have enough problems, real and potential, with our food as is.
That's what cellular construction would be for - the bugs get into one room, or maybe one building. You then do the equivalent of nuking that area, repairing whatever was broken that let the bugs in before hitting it with whatever's necessary to kill all the bugs, their eggs, etc... Then you restock/reseed.
But seriously, I've seen what they do in these rooms - they wear the same sort of clean-room gear people working in chip fabs wear.
Hmm... You do not think the companies supplying these millions and millions (across the globe) generators are going to reduce prices with their new higher demand? I do not think it will happen right away but it seems only logical that the price will go down.
Them already having 'good' economy of scale means that any drop in price from the higher demand will be swamped by other, more or less random changes. Changes such as Chinese worker's next pay raise.
Additionally, I suspect that the generator and all of its bracing and attachments would weigh much less than the trailer plus all the attachments.
Trailer wheels don't have to be that heavy, and you don't need a completely through axle. A steering system does add weight though.
As for the battery - I figure that it'd have a standard 12V to start it. You can pull enough energy from an auxiliary plug to run the electronics, but starting an engine is a different ballgame.
There is the issue of cost. Renting them is likely to be the first option.
Twas my first thought. Buying them from the dealer with the car - that's an extra step I'm hesitant on.
As for auxiliary batteries, well, that would quickly exceed the weight allowance of most cars.
As for your RV, if it's draw is 'intense' even when parked, you might have a problem with your electrical.
I most certainly don't see towing multiple trailers - if your RV is a trailer type, put the generator in it! I think I mentioned somewhere of having an adapter kit so you could mount the generator on most trailers assuming you have some room, but I don't think it was here.
Why? Because let's face it - people take RVs camping where there isn't necessarily electricity all the time, there's space for a generator and fuel tank(in most), and it's all round handy. All you have to do is run the wiring so it helps power the towing vehicle.
I was actually thinking a government run program for the distribution and thinking that the scale of producing these things would be such that they would be cheaper (eventually) than the average home/small business capable generator would be.
You're looking at extra equipment, things like highway speed capable wheels and axles, fairings, more electronics, etc... No, they're not going to be cheaper than the average standbye generator, which already has world wide production levels to have good economy of scale.
To put it another way, the same Briggs&Stratton engine can be put into generators, power washers, lawn mowers, pumps, and many other devices. They get their economy of scale from there, not from the specific frame.
On owning the trailer - Not a big deal if it's doing double duty as a home generator. Keep in mind that it's not the trailer body that's expensive in this case, it's the generator itself - which runs $4-5k, given that we want something that can run all day with good efficiency.
Oh, and the $3k for the steering upgrade is it's cost some time ago - if installed on a lot of trailers it'll be substantially cheaper.
An attached generator would also be lighter than one that is towed which would help with efficiency though a trailer does not decrease efficiency _much_ when it is in motion though it is horrific in stop-and-go traffic.
Not necessarily. Remember that you need to reinforce stuff to withstand being attached at a single point, not to mention the drop down legs and stuff for when you remove it. As for stop&go traffic - remember that that's where EVs shine with regenerative braking. Trailers on traditional vehicles suck in stop&go because you're scrubbing all your kinetic energy every time you stop, and that's proportional to the weight of your vehicle and any trailer. With an EV at least a portion of that ends up in the battery instead.
Though I agree - the common case would be to drop the trailer as soon as practical once you get into town, before doing 'lots' of city driving.
Theft could be an issue, but as you say, there are ways to secure things.
Investigation still ongoing, yada yada, it's happened in the past that in such cases they deliberately bypassed the interlocks because they thought they knew better.
Load up a bunch on a truck and then use smaller vehicles to transport them out to the various sites. If they were built at different sizes, perhaps for a size for an EV freight-hauling vehicle, then those would likely be larger generators and maybe could handle powering a small store, a nursing home, etc... That might be a good bonus.
If you're 'loading them up on a trailer' to take to an emergency site, you're better off just taking cage-style generators. The stores, nursing homes, and such should already have them. It's one of the reasons I'm against anti-gouging laws. If a store spends the money to have generation systems so it can stay in business even with the power outage, it should be able to raise it's prices to cover the generators*, overtime/hazard pay for employees, etc...
I expect it to be expensive (even if artificially and no I do not suspect the market to correct it with any great speed) and something that is not included on lower-end models.
It's about a $3k option. So no, it's not going to be on the cheapest trailers, but it's not 'that' expensive. Especially if U-haul figures out that it saves them money.
Then you get systems like the ford auto-backup. Which IS a vehicle mounted option.
Also, these are people traveling. They are not just people moving. Comparing them to a rental such as U-Haul is intellectually deceiving if not intellectually dishonest.
I'm not comparing people traveling to U-Haul. I'm saying that I see the most common trailer case to be that the trailer is rented, the car is owned, because the people are using the trailer for 1-2% of their driving needs, and don't need the trailer around taking up space and still requiring maintenance when they don't need it.
If they're such an edge case like you, that they'd more or less constantly have the trailer on their vehicle, it's time to ditch the trailer and just buy a hybrid in the first place. Do not mistake me for a 'single solution' type of person, though I will get into the 'weeds' when concentrating on a single topic. Once you remove the people who never go that far(I used to drive from ND to NE to visit my parents. Now that the trip would be from AK to FL, I fly), those that do it relaxed enough that supercharger stations would keep up with them(my parents), those that do it constantly enough that they just buy a hybrid in the first place, etc... There's not a lot of trailers left.
This does not discount the idea of a trailer, it is simply another line of thinking that I have been mulling over since first pondering the trailer idea.
I pondered it myself, but kept hitting a wall at the steering issue. Except for backing, a trailer changing steering less than hanging the weight off the vehicle. Plus, I got 600 pounds by looking up the weight of a 22kW generator. Add in fuel, wiring, etc...
So you're looking at needing a way to lift said attachment to place onto the vehicle - which would not be easy, and moving it around without wheels is a pain. I can move my much larger trailer by hand if necessary when it's unloaded, 600 pounds on wheels is relatively easy.
Some early hybrid designs were to feature a removable motor/secondary battery/storage area, but you run into weight/storage issues there - do you want a motor taking up your trunk space when you're going on a long trip?
As for an example trailer consider this article about one in development. 22kW - right on the money! Barely visible out the rear-view mirror, but yes, wider than I expected.
*which, even discounting purchase costs, fuel costs for the electricity to run the store are going to be substantially higher during the outage.
What's really amazing is that books are so insensitive to this trend.
That's the thing; they aren't so insensitive to it. You have the hardback, then the paperback, then they hit the discount racks, used bookstores, etc...
What's amazing is that it's the e-books that are so insensitive to this.
And going by what Baen's released for their policies, it's the distributors such as Apple and Amazon that are pushing not only this, but DRM and such.
Digital content has to be cheap because it's worth much, much less than physical content due to lack of resales.
True, but given that I wait for said massive sales actually means that I end up paying LESS for my games(on average), than the difference between buying a game new and then selling it to a store like gamestop, and as a bonus I get to keep my game!
So I'd argue that it's not worth that much less, and I still remember reading an article where the author argued that the resale market for games, especially server-dependent online ones, actually drives the price for games UP, and that the continuing profit TO the studio from steam-style sales provides incentive to keep improving the game. His arguments were quite well reasoned, even if I didn't agree with all of them.
Of course, this is getting away from e-book sale prices a bit. You don't normally expect to see revisions to a published book, even though such would be possible with a e-book, and such may not be welcome. "Han shot first!" type stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Homicide in common law jurisdictions (which includes Canada) requires the presence of mens rea [wikipedia.org], better known as intent. Can you get inside this kid's head and say that he wanted someone to die? Because that's the burden you'd need to meet to convict him of attempted homicide.
Felony murder rule would mean that if any of the SWAT officers pulled a trigger and killed somebody, the kid would be guilty of murder.
Though I agree, it's probably a high bar for most prosecutors to reach for. Felony endangerment charges, reckless disregard for somebody's life, that's much more accessible.
In my book, the objective is to catch these guys consistently enough, and provide a serious enough sentence, that nobody else thinks it is a good idea.
I think this can't be stated enough. When it comes to punishment as a deterrent, consistency is of far greater concern than the amount.
If the result of SWATTING was an immediate bucket of ice water over the head of the offender and his computer*, odds are nobody would do it twice, the word would spread, and most wouldn't do it even the first time.
More so than a 1% catch rate all punished by a decade in prison.
*destroying the computer, in this instance, even if it's in a case that would normally protect it sufficiently from a sudden deluge of ice water.
MITM at the gateway/proxy. This is mandated by the Sarbanes-Oxley act [wikipedia.org] in the US, and is likely imposed by US corporations in other jurisdictions.
Do you have a better source than wikipedia on this? Reading through the act I saw no such requirement. I understand that the act imposes a lot of requirements on public businesses, but requiring MITM decryption at the gateway/proxy isn't listed as a requirement or even as an enabler to help with other requirements.
I do the same thing. All I can say is 'get a couple more credit cards or ask the companies to increase your limits'. While the applications would be a short term hit to your credit, long term you would improve your score by having a lower debt:limit ratio.
Statistics wise, with only 10 launches the system could really have up to a 10% failure rate and 0 failures in 10 would be a perfectly reasonable result.
They may be self-insuring (getting lower launch costs by not requiring insurance - maybe the launch is $150M insured).
This was my thought. Rocket launches are risky, so any insurance is going to be expensive.
So let's say they require commercial insurance to be bought, and the insurance company correctly predicts a 5% failure rate. But they have expenses to cover, the insurance is 'unusual' and highly variable, it's a small market, etc....
Just to break even, they would have to charge 1/20th the cost per launch, but that's not the end of it. They have expenses and profit to worry about. For something like rocket launches? 20% overhead wouldn't be out of line, I think.
So rather than the 'insurance' cost per launch being 5%, it's now 6%. For a $100M launch, that means self covering costs, on average, $5M. Commercial insurance would increase that to $6M.
As far as identity theft? My wife's hospital bills shoved us into Chapter 13 (one year left - yay!), so good luck with that...
Depends on the form of the identity theft. Not all of it is tied to credit today.
Some alternatives:
Medical: They get hold of enough information, they bill your insurance for bogus procedures. Works best for patients on Medicare.
Drugs: Variant on the medical. Fake up a prescription for you, utilize online pharmacy to get pills.
Tax: Submit a bogus tax refund application the moment it's possible, long before you get around to it. Then you find yourself being questioned by the IRS as to why you claimed 15 dependents, and the precise amount of income to qualify for the maximum earned income credit...
Thing is, some card companies don't report your carried balance - they report how much you were carrying on X date. So if you simply bought 'a lot' of stuff that month, it could affect your score.
Alternatively something that had been improving your score, such as a paid off loan, might have aged to the point that it doesn't count as much(or any) anymore, thus no longer providing that boost.
Final option is that the company tweaked it's formulas. They do that regularly.
Yes. Many times. And my search results always show plenty of different ways that 100% renewable is possible, today (by today I mean existing technology, not the time to implement obviously).
Okay, I think I see where the issue is. While slashdot has it's own idiots, I think that it would be a relatively rare slashdotter that would disagree that we have the technology such that we could provide effectively 100% of our electricity needs via renewable sources.
I certainly think it's technically possible. But once you take a step back and look at the resources it would take to do so, the cost is the disallowing factor. Thus why I was careful to put 'economically' in my post, and I'll admit that I don't always remember it.
Back when it would have cost $120k to replace $1200 worth of electricity a year, it was technically possible, but economical suicide, to go with PV panels for electricity. Back then batteries cost so much, and degraded so quickly, that the wear on the batteries exceeded the cost of the electricity to fill them. As a result, they were very much special purpose devices used in remote areas.
But with the cost of that solar array having dropped to under $20k, with LiIon dropping drastically in price even as their lifespan increased(at least in large battery packs with charge management systems that treat them 'properly'), as I mentioned, the economics are changing.
Here is even a group that worked with scientists, engineers, etc.. to come up with 50 customized plans for 100% renewable energy for all 50 states. http://thesolutionsproject.org...
Noticeably lacking: cost estimates for the infrastructure - found it in their 'more information', but it's buried in a spreadsheet.
For example - they propose putting PV on 54% of residental rooftops up here in Alaska(Table 4), but only anticipate it providing 0.2% of our power needs. Table 6 shows that it'd cost $1k per person per year in climate-change 'benefits'. It'd cost the state over $1B(table 8).
Expanded cost results by state - $119B to change over, for the state of Alaska. That's 'only' $161k per person.
Funny: They show replacing a fuel burning truck with a 2 seat EV. I'm a single guy in Alaska. I wouldn't last a week in that thing in the winter. Though I do want to see a EV/Strong hybrid truck.
They also somehow figure we'd use 40% less energy by switching to electricity everywhere. Doing that would essentially require rebuilding 90% of our homes. I mean, I want a dome-home, but I can't afford to build one right now.
Finally, I'll toss your 'claiming it' back at you. Just change #4 to 'paid shills of renewable energy'. I support more renewable energy, but don't think we can afford to reach 100% anytime soon without major developments in the technology.
Heh - mythbusters, car on cliff tipped over by birds myth. We're at the point they've tossed a dozen chickens onto it. There's another dozen or so to go before the renewable energy truly tips over the cliff, but the mythbusters are getting impatient for their crash...
If they are following universal precautions, it won't matter if they are sick or not... (yes, I work in healthcare). If they don't know this, they are not doing the right things.
The 'universal precautions' would include not coming into work when ill, wouldn't it? I mean, as far as preventing disease transmission goes, just look at how many hospital workers end up catching ebola, despite far more serious efforts to prevent it.
As a doctor, you come in with the flu or something, just like anybody else you're likely giving it to your fellow employees and customers.
This version is 'merely' a toy. Colorful plastic makes more sense than metal.
As for 'no material strong enough', that depends on the task, doesn't it?
You know, I can't help but wonder, if you stuck a really, really high RPM drive on his machine whether you'd bust the concrete at the final stage or blow up the first gearbox stage first?
Or, assuming you put the fastest drive on the first stage that wouldn't blow it up, whether the concrete would weather away before being broken off?
and it need not have a ratio as high as 11 million to one.
Indeed, I think there's a difference that some posters here are missing between something that's a 'useful application' and a 'demonstration of concept'. The puzzle maker made a demonstration of concept. For one thing, I didn't see any provision to convert the final rotary piece into 'work' - IE turn or rotate something else. You would also need to figure out how to properly brace it. Still, when making your own it would be easy enough to do.
I'd be interested to know how much energy is wasted through the large number of gears, and how much relative stress is placed on each part.
Yeah, that's gotta be more efficient than overalls and a flannel shirt, riding a tractor in a field...
The places I'm thinking about humans don't go into much at all, most of it's robotic.
And while it's more expensive 'right now', consider the expense of growing crops in South America to ship up to the USA.
The economics of it is complex, to say the least. What it amounts to is that you're spending 200+ times as much per acre, but you're getting something like 100 times the productivity, lower shipping costs, and less ruined product by the time it reaches the stores.
What's that got to do with UI changes and user experience?
Don't know about the Therac, but I've read of a number of cases where poor user interfaces resulted in warnings being ignored and medicine being given improperly. Presumably in order to 'protect' themselves the company had every little possibility throw a warning, to the point that they didn't have a 'I really mean it this time!' warning. Stuff like administering around 50 times the intended dose of an antibiotic to a person.
I think what the Libertarians fail to realize is that farmers, as a general rule, are not smart enough to diversify or maintain course.
I tend to consider myself a moderate libertarian, but even I recognize that 'diversification' in this sense is expensive in that it wrecks your efficiency. As was mentioned earlier, a lot of the equipment that makes farming corn profitable even with lots of competition is extremely specialized for working with corn, but still freaking expensive, even if it can process tens, hundreds, or even millions of acres of corn a year. Seriously, some of those big harvesters are measured in acres harvested per minute.
Thus, in order to make a profit, you need to be as large and specialized as possible. The demand for staple crops - corn, wheat, rice, beans, and such is high enough to justify said investments year in and year out. It's a rather high amount of capital investment, so normally speaking you're only going to see fields expand at a limited pace year to year.
As a result, even 'diversifying' can kill your business as you're out-competed by the specialists.
On the other hand, having seen multiple meltdowns and supply shocks, I can tell you that I do NOT want to see this with food. It's bad enough that pork spikes because of some disease(last one I think was imported from China, killed 2/3rds of the piglets infected).
The problem is that while I'm philosophically against paying farmers not to farm, the situation is freaking complex, and any transition from the current situation to a more philosophically 'pure' one is going to have to be carefully planned. I can't give two shits about e-businesses, the housing market, or automobiles in the face of how bad a truly screwed we could be in a 'farming crash'. We have enough problems, real and potential, with our food as is.
That's what cellular construction would be for - the bugs get into one room, or maybe one building. You then do the equivalent of nuking that area, repairing whatever was broken that let the bugs in before hitting it with whatever's necessary to kill all the bugs, their eggs, etc... Then you restock/reseed.
But seriously, I've seen what they do in these rooms - they wear the same sort of clean-room gear people working in chip fabs wear.
Hmm... You do not think the companies supplying these millions and millions (across the globe) generators are going to reduce prices with their new higher demand? I do not think it will happen right away but it seems only logical that the price will go down.
Them already having 'good' economy of scale means that any drop in price from the higher demand will be swamped by other, more or less random changes. Changes such as Chinese worker's next pay raise.
Additionally, I suspect that the generator and all of its bracing and attachments would weigh much less than the trailer plus all the attachments.
Trailer wheels don't have to be that heavy, and you don't need a completely through axle. A steering system does add weight though.
As for the battery - I figure that it'd have a standard 12V to start it. You can pull enough energy from an auxiliary plug to run the electronics, but starting an engine is a different ballgame.
There is the issue of cost. Renting them is likely to be the first option.
Twas my first thought. Buying them from the dealer with the car - that's an extra step I'm hesitant on.
As for auxiliary batteries, well, that would quickly exceed the weight allowance of most cars.
As for your RV, if it's draw is 'intense' even when parked, you might have a problem with your electrical.
I most certainly don't see towing multiple trailers - if your RV is a trailer type, put the generator in it! I think I mentioned somewhere of having an adapter kit so you could mount the generator on most trailers assuming you have some room, but I don't think it was here.
Why? Because let's face it - people take RVs camping where there isn't necessarily electricity all the time, there's space for a generator and fuel tank(in most), and it's all round handy. All you have to do is run the wiring so it helps power the towing vehicle.
I was actually thinking a government run program for the distribution and thinking that the scale of producing these things would be such that they would be cheaper (eventually) than the average home/small business capable generator would be.
You're looking at extra equipment, things like highway speed capable wheels and axles, fairings, more electronics, etc... No, they're not going to be cheaper than the average standbye generator, which already has world wide production levels to have good economy of scale.
To put it another way, the same Briggs&Stratton engine can be put into generators, power washers, lawn mowers, pumps, and many other devices. They get their economy of scale from there, not from the specific frame.
On owning the trailer - Not a big deal if it's doing double duty as a home generator. Keep in mind that it's not the trailer body that's expensive in this case, it's the generator itself - which runs $4-5k, given that we want something that can run all day with good efficiency.
Oh, and the $3k for the steering upgrade is it's cost some time ago - if installed on a lot of trailers it'll be substantially cheaper.
An attached generator would also be lighter than one that is towed which would help with efficiency though a trailer does not decrease efficiency _much_ when it is in motion though it is horrific in stop-and-go traffic.
Not necessarily. Remember that you need to reinforce stuff to withstand being attached at a single point, not to mention the drop down legs and stuff for when you remove it. As for stop&go traffic - remember that that's where EVs shine with regenerative braking. Trailers on traditional vehicles suck in stop&go because you're scrubbing all your kinetic energy every time you stop, and that's proportional to the weight of your vehicle and any trailer. With an EV at least a portion of that ends up in the battery instead.
Though I agree - the common case would be to drop the trailer as soon as practical once you get into town, before doing 'lots' of city driving.
Theft could be an issue, but as you say, there are ways to secure things.
And this is why we have 'Lock out Tag Out' procedures. If the suit took his lock off, no wonder he got a good settlement.
And LOTO is a lot older than a decade.
And (wink wink nudge nudge) we're losing a lot of money with this machine out of commission, you wouldn't want us to lose a bunch of money would you?
Unlikely in Germany. As has been noted elsewhere, they tend to be obsessive rule followers.
That being said, disregard of such could be part of what's helping it to national and world news. Because it's so unusual.
Investigation still ongoing, yada yada, it's happened in the past that in such cases they deliberately bypassed the interlocks because they thought they knew better.
Load up a bunch on a truck and then use smaller vehicles to transport them out to the various sites. If they were built at different sizes, perhaps for a size for an EV freight-hauling vehicle, then those would likely be larger generators and maybe could handle powering a small store, a nursing home, etc... That might be a good bonus.
If you're 'loading them up on a trailer' to take to an emergency site, you're better off just taking cage-style generators. The stores, nursing homes, and such should already have them. It's one of the reasons I'm against anti-gouging laws. If a store spends the money to have generation systems so it can stay in business even with the power outage, it should be able to raise it's prices to cover the generators*, overtime/hazard pay for employees, etc...
I expect it to be expensive (even if artificially and no I do not suspect the market to correct it with any great speed) and something that is not included on lower-end models.
It's about a $3k option. So no, it's not going to be on the cheapest trailers, but it's not 'that' expensive. Especially if U-haul figures out that it saves them money.
Then you get systems like the ford auto-backup. Which IS a vehicle mounted option.
Also, these are people traveling. They are not just people moving. Comparing them to a rental such as U-Haul is intellectually deceiving if not intellectually dishonest.
I'm not comparing people traveling to U-Haul. I'm saying that I see the most common trailer case to be that the trailer is rented, the car is owned, because the people are using the trailer for 1-2% of their driving needs, and don't need the trailer around taking up space and still requiring maintenance when they don't need it.
If they're such an edge case like you, that they'd more or less constantly have the trailer on their vehicle, it's time to ditch the trailer and just buy a hybrid in the first place. Do not mistake me for a 'single solution' type of person, though I will get into the 'weeds' when concentrating on a single topic. Once you remove the people who never go that far(I used to drive from ND to NE to visit my parents. Now that the trip would be from AK to FL, I fly), those that do it relaxed enough that supercharger stations would keep up with them(my parents), those that do it constantly enough that they just buy a hybrid in the first place, etc... There's not a lot of trailers left.
This does not discount the idea of a trailer, it is simply another line of thinking that I have been mulling over since first pondering the trailer idea.
I pondered it myself, but kept hitting a wall at the steering issue. Except for backing, a trailer changing steering less than hanging the weight off the vehicle. Plus, I got 600 pounds by looking up the weight of a 22kW generator. Add in fuel, wiring, etc...
So you're looking at needing a way to lift said attachment to place onto the vehicle - which would not be easy, and moving it around without wheels is a pain. I can move my much larger trailer by hand if necessary when it's unloaded, 600 pounds on wheels is relatively easy.
Some early hybrid designs were to feature a removable motor/secondary battery/storage area, but you run into weight/storage issues there - do you want a motor taking up your trunk space when you're going on a long trip?
As for an example trailer consider this article about one in development. 22kW - right on the money! Barely visible out the rear-view mirror, but yes, wider than I expected.
*which, even discounting purchase costs, fuel costs for the electricity to run the store are going to be substantially higher during the outage.
What's really amazing is that books are so insensitive to this trend.
That's the thing; they aren't so insensitive to it. You have the hardback, then the paperback, then they hit the discount racks, used bookstores, etc...
What's amazing is that it's the e-books that are so insensitive to this.
And going by what Baen's released for their policies, it's the distributors such as Apple and Amazon that are pushing not only this, but DRM and such.
Digital content has to be cheap because it's worth much, much less than physical content due to lack of resales.
True, but given that I wait for said massive sales actually means that I end up paying LESS for my games(on average), than the difference between buying a game new and then selling it to a store like gamestop, and as a bonus I get to keep my game!
So I'd argue that it's not worth that much less, and I still remember reading an article where the author argued that the resale market for games, especially server-dependent online ones, actually drives the price for games UP, and that the continuing profit TO the studio from steam-style sales provides incentive to keep improving the game. His arguments were quite well reasoned, even if I didn't agree with all of them.
Of course, this is getting away from e-book sale prices a bit. You don't normally expect to see revisions to a published book, even though such would be possible with a e-book, and such may not be welcome. "Han shot first!" type stuff.