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thelurkerawakens

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hubskier for: 2323 days

recent comments, posts, and shares:
thelurkerawakens  ·  1106 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "For me, a bag of chips is a way to defeat time." - The New York Times

I can't work out if that was genuine poetry or the best example of post-modernist marketing I have ever read.

thelurkerawakens  ·  1262 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Leaked Amazon data shows automated warehouses have higher injury rates

The hierarchy of seriousness of injury at the workplace typically goes: Fatality, debilitating injury, lost time, modified duties, medical treatment, near miss. Whether you define serious as lost time or modified duties (as Amazon seem to) 14000 incidents across 150 sites is very poor.

Some of the plants I work with have been on a long term journey on safety and are achieving milestones like 1 million hours since a Modified Duty with some fairly intrinsically hazardous processes (wood, hand saws, nail guns). So does seem to suggest safety doesn't get quite the leadership at Amazon that it could do with.

thelurkerawakens  ·  1263 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 17 equations that changed the world

Hey, remember the before times before hubski and similar when we bought toilet books for 10min bite-sized reads? The book this comes from I still have yellowing away on my downstairs toilet shelf and was one of my faves.

Other than doing i squared equals minus 1 instead of going to the most beautiful equation in mathematics, it is a great book.

It sits on my shelf between "How to fossilise your hamster." - A New Scientist compilation - and "100 places you will never visit" by Daniel Smith.

thelurkerawakens  ·  1264 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Plutocrat punch down

I am with Bill on this one. Fortunately informed by a few years as a logistics manager.

For Heavy Goods Vehicles at cruising speed there are two major resistances that need power to maintain speed: Air drag and Rolling resistance. Drag is independent of weight but is typically a quarter of the effect of rolling resistance which is proportional to weight. So heavy batteries will drive up your overall power demands per tonne-km moved. Acceleration is rather a small part of a long distance trucks overall energy needs so can be ignored.

Trains are a different story. Rolling resistance is negligible as steel on steel has a very low rolling coefficient, so you can pile on the heavy battery packs with little impact on performance.

thelurkerawakens  ·  1649 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What was the best financial advice that you have ever heard?

Never insure anything you can afford to replace or live without.

thelurkerawakens  ·  1663 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: On Brexit, we're seeing the final contradictions play out

If the referendum was taken in good faith as an advisory then I agree that it need not be specific to be "democratic". A 52:48 result interpreted with cross party parliamentary support for the softest of Brexits would be democratically consistent.

The problem was that Theresa May tried to find a Brexit that satisfied her divided party but not parliament. Parliament was willing to support Brexit as they showed with executing article 50. The rhetorical narrative that anyone not supporting a Hard or No Deal Brexit are not respecting the democratic mandate of the referendum is simply that - rhetoric. An unspecific advisory referendum is entirely consistent with a parliamentary democracy and if Parliament can't find a compromise then General Election is the reasonable way forward under status quo conditions, not default disruptive exit. Any other course is undemocratic by UK constitutional convention.