Gasoline and diesel usually sell by volume, and if the temperature of the fuel is cold when you purchase it, you get more kilos per volume than you do when the dispensing tank is warmer.
There is quite a bit more expansion & contraction of hydrocarbons with temperature than many peoople expect.
In the US we're considering pounds per gallon rather than kilos per liter then ;)
Fuels containing a higher amount of Aromatic class hydrocarbons, (or just lesser "light" hydrocarbons) will have a higher density (lb/gal) compared to fuels having lower amounts of the heavier molecules.
Also the aromatics bring with them higher antiknock ratings which can also be better for efficiency in a number of different engines.
When acceptable octane rating is achieved by ethanol content instead, it works good too, but fuel efficiency is reduced chemically because alcohol does not consist of only carbon & hydrogen, alcohol molecules also contain oxygen which provides bulk but not energy, so alcohols can be considered to already be "partially oxidized hydrocarbons" to begin with. It's really the oxidation process of the burning fuel that provides the energy, and alcohols just have less to give than hydrocarbons.
Miles per gallon is the conventionally understandable measurement units, and even fuel injectors meter the fuel in by volume, but actual energy obtained and resulting engine efficiency depends on performance per weight of fuel, not exactly per gallon directly.
During changing seasons I like to feel the metal part of the gas nozzle for temperature during dispensing. One of the worst times is when a tank trailer has been sitting in the sun a while before delivery, and it's 95 Fahrenheit when it's not even that hot outside. I like it much better when a trailer comes from northern locations where the fuel is less than 60 degrees, then I buy more but don't fill it up. It's nice when it is colder fuel to purchase and if it's a hot summer once the gas warms up to ambient conditions you end up with more gallons than you pumped, but if you are not careful the gas tank will overflow "autonomously" if you fill it too much with cold fuel when it warms up like that :0
There are a number of other factors too, but this one is often overlooked.
Before Apple ever came along, failure to engineer in all kinds of extreme repairability was a recognized hallmark of unsuitability for mission-critical applications. Widely distributed repair manuals were of course table-stakes too.
Woz was well-aware of this from HP's legendary performance at the time.
It's just not easy to stay on the most correct path when there are so many shiny distractions.
Now the Neo sounds like a step in the right direction.
>one of the most repairable macs in decades.
With the Neo they could be jumping right back on the right path from a distance. Which is an improvement but it does also show they could have been doing it the entire time if they had the serious commitment to mission-critical users.
The only real way for it to be a game-changer is if they actually change their game :)
They will change their game in some ways, or they'll have to stop selling in the EU. I'm sure the Neo was engineered for this. Apple really hate re-engineering mac cases. Even the plastic macbook that had a huge design flaw (the cracking topcase because of the screen bezel spacers crushing it), had this flaw for 4 years until they finally fixed it, and that was not really to fix the problem but because they wanted to do a glossy new design. For some reason they preferred fixing the topicase over and over for free instead of just fixing the problem. And it wouldn't have needed much. All that would have been needed was to modify the screen bezel: Make the plastic spacers either a lot wider (to spread out the pressure) or of a softer material. It's pretty insane they didn't even bother to redesign such a simple plastic part.
I had mine replaced 3 times over the 6 years I used it. Sometimes with some complaints as I had replaced the LCD with a matte panel (the plastic macbook used an atrocious quality ultra-reflecting TN screen with shit viewing angles). But they always did it for free after some pressure.
So I can imagine they wanted to be ahead of the game this time because the EU will set a deadline and they hate doing redesigns. I can't fathom why they hate doing that so much though. I worked in manufacturing too and we did small tweaks periodically, every 2-3 months or so there'd be a minor hardware revision to take comments from QA into account or to optimize for pricing & availability of components. Usually not the kind of redesign an untrained eye actually would notice. But Apple somehow just hates it.
That may not even be where the devices are most toxic to the environment :\
How about all the energy waste for manufacture of what are "engineered" as effectively disposable components & assemblies in numerous facilities?
Also scattered local emissions, not only at the factories and delivery ships & trucks, but consumers kick up all kinds of exhaust and waste just earning the money to participate in such a scheme. And way more so for short-lived products that are the least bit overpriced compared to how they could be from the same factory.
>“The consumer AI ecosystem is a must-win if it is ever to justify [that] valuation,”
People have pointed out the similarity to the mainframe era in a number of ways and this is one of them.
When the only way for consumers to get their own personal "world-changing" computation accomplished was by relying on expensive remote data centers (because that's where the mainframes were), it was never going to fly off the shelf. And there was plenty of time for it to mature as fully as it could.
Nothing is any real help to consumers or even most businesses until what are still known as "data centers" are completely un-necessary to them. Like when PCs came along and were powerful enough to finally exceed the abilities that centralized mainframes had to offer, and at a virtually insignificant cost by comparison. An unbeatable combination.
AI can't be expected to yield its best financial performance for consumers either, until everything the massive data centers being built have to offer, has been exceeded by a typical affordable desktop PC. Again. But this time in the 21st century.
Nothing less will do, until then might as well be still tied to a mainframe.
Which was not too bad IIRC, but limited to serving the very few, compared to PCs which ended up capable of serving almost anybody.
And mainframes are by no means completely obsolete, but gained widespread recognition as passe already decades ago,
It's not going to be as good as it could be, for investors especially, until expensive data centers are equally as passe.
Before PCs, the projected need for increasing tonnage of future mainframe data centers (which incidentally have somewhat long delivery times) was pretty reliable, until one day it wasn't. I wouldn't have wanted to be one who was still bound to take delivery after that.
By the same token indications are that today's new data center construction momentum will "eventually" outrun the need to complete every single project even after ground has been broken.
This could be big simply because, with the scale it is happening at, it cannot possibly be small :\
For decades I've built labs primarily for chemical instrumentation, sometimes with electronic capabilities in excess of other chemical labs. This article emphasizes success in building dedicated electronic labs, sometimes having outstanding chemical abilities as an option as well.
There are a number of things in common either way
With the gas lines, don't trust contractors, do as much of the design, build, inspect, and verify your own self. This is usually an embarrassing failure otherwise.
Use Swagelok (top-shelf, having polished threads) brass fittings with straight hardened copper tubing, available in 20 foot lengths, manually cut to size and hand-dressed to outperform the near-perfect output of motorized abrasive cutoff alternatives. Don't make me laugh if you think a plumber's tubing cutter is appropriate, that's a desperate tool for when you can not physically remove particles from an emergency modification of an established system.
Your specialty gases need to have the lengths of tubing manually cleaned with high-purity solvents or steam anyway before installation, and that washes away the particles generated during the cutting process.
Stainless steel tubing & fittings work too and can have an impressive look, but the exact same extreme effort will not result in as leak-free of a system than copper & brass, which makes a big difference with light gases like helium or hydrogen which are escape artists. For utility vacuum (or aggressive gases which might not be best centralized anyway), stainless might be needed if corrosives are being sucked in for centralized trapping, but I never would consider anything less than a dedicated local vacuum pump(s) for high vacuum work on an individual basis.
A vacuum line may benefit from larger diameter tubing, but one of the good ways of doing it for the gases is to use 0.25 inch diameter tubing rated to handle thousands of PSI. Even if you are starting out with a single gas cylinder/regulator in the supply area and delivering the typical 125 psi to the benchtop locations. With a number of further downstream workstations in use simultaneously someday, 0.25 tubing will not be able to deliver enough gas through that small diameter at 125 psi. But if everything is done correctly, conversion can be made later, to run the same gas distribution lines at higher pressures with appropriate new central tank regulators, or even at full tank pressure. Then using an additional local gas regulator at each workstation. Alternatively upsizing the tubing diameter by one notch would then require more wall thickness and then it becomes a real PITA compared to 0.25 inch.
Therefore the completed specialty gas delivery lines should ideally be leak tested over a period of days using full tank pressure of about 2500 psi. And under these conditions you should be able to develop the proper engineering technique for assembling the brass-to-copper so that it almost always shows no detectable leaks every time.
You will also need a flow damper on each main line to limit or shut down in case of major full-pressure uncontrolled escape during an unplanned lab incident. You don't want liters per second of flammable or asphyxiant gases to be able to pour into the lab on top of any other undesirable occurrences. Not even oxygen, which has its own specialized hazards including self-ignition of trace combustibles in the tubing by surprise, like oily residue or even fine metal particles. Oxygen has been known to behave safely for years before an unusual pressure shock occurs and ignites an internal hazard that was lurking overlooked the whole time.
Linux is still useless for most chemical instruments, and Windows has not been suitable for the internet for years, so I need a completely air-gapped LAN of the local lab PCs, each of which can be recovered to its original "immutable" condition from backup, without anything ever having been connected to the web. Mainly for productivity, but safety is also a major consideration for all corporate IT to be barred from labs. They're good at what they do, but their hands are more than full with office machines where it's still a lot uglier that it should be for all the work they are putting in.
It's a lot easier to train natural scientists to do everything with PC's that their particular lab is going to need, than it is to train corporate IT operators to do an outstanding job of anything a unique lab needs.
This one did result in a recession, during which some people who had lived through the Great Depression once again had to live about the same way again, for years, whether you wanted to call it another depression of not.
In 1987 and 2008 those were highly measurable stock drops but mostly concentrated in the stock markets themselves. Without as much consumer exposure, nor the world-destroying ripple effects from more dramatic drops over a longer period of time under conditions that were magnitudes more unstable worldwide.
> In 1987 and 2008 those were highly measurable stock drops but mostly concentrated in the stock markets themselves.
But my point is exactly, how do you know that 1929 wasn't just like them? My whole point is that what actually matters is what happens after the crash.
1929 was special because of structural issue in the inter-war central banking system, but the right action could still have result in a strong bounce back where by latest 1931 would have been done.
That is a good point, crashes are going to happen, and what occurs afterward is what counts the most.
I think what everyone still living can observe is what did actually happen after each crash, using after-the-fact well-curated data having good-to-moderate degrees of provenance.
Going back to 1929, very little first-hand observation from before the crash is still available, and most people at the time didn't understand the implications either. When I was growning up though, my neighborhood was crowded by people from all walks of life who had been through it, before, during, and after. I would say many of their experiences have been unpublished probably because lots of them were "unpublishable."
With 1973, I had already been a teenage stockbroker well before that and I remember it well. The Nixon shitshow had been building for years. Presidential malfeasance can do damage like few other things, even worse when it's a US President which puts the dollar itself at stake.
So my observation is what happens before the crash has more influence on what happens afterward, compared to the steepness of the crash itself.
In general I think the larger point is that the 'crash' is the point people in their mind associate it with the 'period after'. That is a sensible way for humans to think in most situation. And its not unreasonable for everyday people.
But if we are discussing economics we need to understand that the link between 'crash' and 'recession' is complex. You can have a country going into recession without a 'crash' and you can have a 'crash' without a recession.
There is quite a bit more expansion & contraction of hydrocarbons with temperature than many peoople expect.
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