Hacker News: mech975

New comment by mech975 in "Welcome to the Zero Sum Era. Now How Do We Get Out?"

mech975 — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:19:56 +0000

Life isn't zero sum. If you look at the state of civilization now vs 2000 years ago, it's clear that we've played enough positive-sum activities to create much more wealth for the average person.

New comment by mech975 in "An investigation into egg prices"

mech975 — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:58:41 +0000

I went to the trouble of finding monthly egg production totals for the US based on "NASS quick stats."

https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/results/80AF9DAE-99AE-31D0-...

Hopefully yall can make heads or tails of the data.

The querying tool is also linked at https://quickstats.nass.usda.gov/#80AF9DAE-99AE-31D0-8F1C-EC...

New comment by mech975 in "Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?"

mech975 — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 08:06:58 +0000

Much of the rise in prices has occurred in January and February. Seems likely to me that culling has continued due to bird flu and production has dropped.

I would also guess that demand is fairly constant for eggs, so large changes in price are needed to deter a small number of consumers from buying (low elasticity of demand).

"rebuilding" a laying flock is a fairly quick change, if the infrastructure is already there.

New comment by mech975 in "Salt Water Dimmers"

mech975 — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 02:20:36 +0000

At a previous job we manufactured fairly large trailer-mounted generators. During design engineering testing, you would want to power a load with the generator to check performance. The test load we had was a giant resistor bank, in a pallet-sized enclosure about 4 feet tall, with fans for active cooling of the oodles of resistance heat being put off by it. I talked to one of the electrical engineers about how ludicrous this device was, and he said that we used to use something even weirder. A giant tank filled with salt water (can't remember for sure if they were using NaCl or a different electrolyte) with probes just dumping all that current right into the water. Wish I had seen it.

New comment by mech975 in "Death of the Department Store"

mech975 — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:24:03 +0000

Any inventory warehouse can choose how much inventory to stock. If it maintains, say, 1 month of monthly demand instead of 3 months, it is more likely to run out of inventory during a supply chain shock. The fragility of the system is more related to this aspect than to anything else.

New comment by mech975 in "New tech can make air-conditioning less harmful to the planet"

mech975 — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 15:53:46 +0000

In the USA the EPA will fine you for intentionally venting refrigerants to the atmosphere instead of using a refrigerant recovery system for recovery/reuse/disposal.

Pretty good reddit thread about the realities of enforcement: https://www.reddit.com/r/HVAC/comments/ugg89h/people_who_hav...

New comment by mech975 in "How to succeed in MrBeast production (Leaked PDF)"

mech975 — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 04:02:38 +0000

I think that when people are jealous of others, they cloak this motivation.

To give an example with interpersonal relationships- never in my adult life have I encountered an adult who freely admits that jealousy is their motivation for attacking the reputation of a friend, but it happens all the time.

New comment by mech975 in "What to do about America's killer cars"

mech975 — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 01:42:39 +0000

CAFE standards were written in such a way as to encourage large vehicle footprints to work around the requirements of the standards.

Motorcycling youtuber fortnine offers a good view on some other aspects of the situation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpuX-5E7xoU

New comment by mech975 in "Tesla Cybertruck Frunk Is Hungry for Fingers"

mech975 — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:41:35 +0000

Mechanical engineer here-

In the video clip at the top of the article, the carrot is placed at the location closest to the window. Given the location of the hinge for the closing mechanism, this is the place where the hinge has the maximum mechanical advantage. The torque imposed on the motor from the load required to smash the carrot is minimized at this location, and any load-sensing feature designed to prevent this sort of injury would have the most difficult time detecting the load here.

The best comparison for an automatically closing tailgate on other cars would be at the very top of the tailgate. I would like to see this comparison. Comparisons made with carrots placed in other locations are not quite as similar.

Still bad safety, just an interesting aside.