With so many saying "the economy" is why they voted for this regime, it's going to be excepionally difficult to convince them to make their own economic prospects worse by striking.
The other issue with a general strike here is that the people backing this up have more money than $deity, and I'm sure that they realize that they have more than a single person could resonably spend in a lifetime. I think that would lead to an acceptable tradeoff of smaller "income" for more power.
I'm afraid a general strike would just be ignored.
Most people won't care until it starts to directly affect them. And I don't mean "this will make air travel less safe and you fly sometimes so this directly affects you," I mean direct, immediate consequences. 90 million eligible voters didn't bother to vote last time around. Another 77 million voted for this. That's two thirds of voters who either don't care or are in favor. And it's not like there was any mystery. Nothing that's happening now should be the least bit surprising.
I don't know! We do, however, have a fun history of the oligarchs getting the governments help breaking the strikes, including using the national guard to gun down striking workers and their families.
> With so many saying "the economy" is why they voted for this regime, it's going to be excepionally difficult to convince them to make their own economic prospects worse by striking.
The price of eggs didn't go down, Trump hasn't done anything pro-economy, and hundreds of thousands of pointless layoffs are happening (DEI firings include conservative wifes, conservatives with disabilities, black conservatives, veterans, who could have known?).
Economic prospects are nose diving regardless, so there's no reason not to strike.
I've turned a few wrenches as a life-long DIY mechanic, a former aircraft mechanic, and a mechanical engineer. I use the Hazard Fraught method of tool purchases:
I will buy a tool from Harbor Freight once. If it fulfills my needs great. Job done and it goes into the toolbox. If I use it so hard it gives up the ghost, then it gets chucked into the fuckit-bucket and I go buy it at higher quality.
To be honest, Harbor Freight and other store brands (Husky, Kobalt, etc) have always been reliable enough. As a home-gamer, I certainly couldn't see being able to have a toolbox full of Snap-On, especially before completing my engineering degree.
If I were a pro and feeding my family depended on what those tools did, then I could certainly see Snap-On as an investment, as my father did when he ran his own shop. But, to the point about rounding off a nut, something like that is rarely a function of tool quality and more about technique. Yes, a cheap 12 point socket or wrench can round off a hex pretty badly, but if it happens, the whole setup has probably been giving warning signs the entire time. My experience is that cheap tools are more likely to snap, break, or shatter during heavy loading, but that's not often the default use case.
> I've turned a few wrenches as a life-long DIY mechanic, a former aircraft mechanic, and a mechanical engineer. I use the Hazard Fraught method of tool purchases: I will buy a tool from Harbor Freight once. If it fulfills my needs great. Job done and it goes into the toolbox. If I use it so hard it gives up the ghost, then it gets chucked into the fuckit-bucket and I go buy it at higher quality.
Now you either have a tool that might be unreliable and can cause you trouble for the next job. Or, you spent money that you didn't have to spend by buying the lower grade tool when you needed to buy something better anyway.
> To be honest, Harbor Freight and other store brands (Husky, Kobalt, etc) have always been reliable enough. As a home-gamer, I certainly couldn't see being able to have a toolbox full of Snap-On, especially before completing my engineering degree.
Here you have a solid point. I am thankful that I am able to afford good tools. But if someone in unable to justify, I would say either work to be able to justify it, rent, or buy the best you can afford if you need the tool right now.
> But, to the point about rounding off a nut, something like that is rarely a function of tool quality and more about technique.
Maybe you are right. But here is an exaggerated example. You have a socket that has more clearance than ideal. You loosen one nut, and that was okay, you loosen the second one, that was a little tighter and that whole setup flexed a bit, but turned out okay. The third one is where things slip. Now, you have a problem. At least that is more or less how I land into trouble.
> Now you either have a tool that might be unreliable and can cause you trouble for the next job. Or, you spent money that you didn't have to spend by buying the lower grade tool when you needed to buy something better anyway.
The "unknowns" point is valid, but the advice to buy something cheap to start with still comes from a good place.
Even from a cost perspective, I've snapped a few wrenches and upgraded my box saw (,and will splurge on a solder iron the next time I do anything serious), but the money wasted in those mis-purchases is vastly less than the money I would have spent on getting the "right" tools at the outset.
You also have the problem of unknown unknowns. Plenty of people are willing to sell you a $25 tool for $250, and we all know how reviews work, so the presence of good reviews and a high price tag isn't sufficient to guarantee quality. Even going with a "good" brand doesn't suffice if the brand is willing to increase profits on a few duds here and there (or, more charitably, just doesn't always hit them out of the park) or goes the way of Lenovo after an acquisition. Buying a good tool is often a nontrivial effort, and (when directing that advice to your average homeowner rather than a professional with that particular tool) the experience you have with the bad tool gives you a starting point for figuring out which aspects you do or don't care about.
For a few small examples, I own the cheapest immersion blender, 16oz claw hammer, precision screwdriver set, ... that I could get my grubby little hands on. I'd make those purchases again in a heartbeat.
For a counter-example, I did the same thing with a diamond stone. It turns out I don't care about the surface area or most characteristics (and now I know), but I care quite a lot about the depth and longevity. I'll save more money getting a longer-lasting stone that's a size I need, despite having "wasted" money on the cheaper stone, since I won't be inadvertently getting something bigger than I need or want. Since those things last ages I'm not sure the point really holds, but it also lasted for years and was purchased at a time when money was tighter, and spending more money then would have been much more expensive than spending it now.
For an actual counter-example, now I know that any wrench where I'm applying more than a few hundred foot-pounds of torque absolutely needs to be forged, and I'm willing to splurge to avoid low-quality steel. The cheaper wrenches were properly wasted money. Compared to all the time and money I've saved only purchasing nice tools when something failed though, I still think it was a good strategy.
>> I've turned a few wrenches as a life-long DIY mechanic, a former aircraft mechanic, and a mechanical engineer. I use the Hazard Fraught method of tool purchases: I will buy a tool from Harbor Freight once. If it fulfills my needs great. Job done and it goes into the toolbox. If I use it so hard it gives up the ghost, then it gets chucked into the fuckit-bucket and I go buy it at higher quality.
>Now you either have a tool that might be unreliable and can cause you trouble for the next job. Or, you spent money that you didn't have to spend by buying the lower grade tool when you needed to buy something better anyway.
An important note is that this is a conscious decision. I know that I cheaped out on something, and I'm often pleasantly surprised that it didn't break. But I'm not depending on it for food, and we have backup transportation methods, so I'm not completely hosed if it gives up. For example: I once spent $20 on a Harbor Freight corded angle grinder, with the understanding that it'll probably work for the one job I really needed it for at that moment. 15 years and half a dozen smoke checks later, the damned thing still runs hard.
>> To be honest, Harbor Freight and other store brands (Husky, Kobalt, etc) have always been reliable enough. As a home-gamer, I certainly couldn't see being able to have a toolbox full of Snap-On, especially before completing my engineering degree.
> Here you have a solid point. I am thankful that I am able to afford good tools. But if someone in unable to justify, I would say either work to be able to justify it, rent, or buy the best you can afford if you need the tool right now.
If you can, that's great. Most of my wrenching life, including working on multi-million dollar automation equipment, has been well serviced by budget tools. Anything pro-grade was handed down from my father after he closed his shop. I'm to the point now where I could reasonably afford to upgrade, but the handtools still work well, and my money/time is honestly spent better right now paying a reputable shop to do what I need. Starting out in the world, I never thought I'd be able to say that, but I'm happy to be here now.
I'll have a project car again some day, and then I'll look hard at what is needed to accomplish my goals.
I think a lot of your thinking here is assuming somewhat frequent use - and I agree when you are going to be using the tools often, just get a decent or good one. For a lot of tools though - well lets just say my tool chest has an awful lot of things I need that one time 20 years ago, and haven't needed since. Often I don't know which tools are going to be in that one-use category, so the algorithm "buy the cheap one, upgrade when needed" has overall saved me more than enough money to upgrade to the really good version even for tools I use relatively rarely.
The other thing that I'll add here is that if the tool has a battery, then I'm going to a well established and supported brand. I know they love to change the technology (Lookin' at you DeWalt) but there are often workarounds. I'll buy into the tool ecosystem because the last thing I want to do is stop my flow to figure out which tool/battery is ready for the task at hand.
> But, to the point about rounding off a nut, something like that is rarely a function of tool quality and more about technique. Yes, a cheap 12 point socket or wrench can round off a hex pretty badly, but if it happens, the whole setup has probably been giving warning signs the entire time.
In the rust belt, about every bolt has lots of warning signs and each job is a gamble. I really need to get a torch.
Knowing the tricks that come with your location are a big deal. I'm in a minor salt part of the US, so I don't often have to worry about pre-treating a fastener on our daily drivers. If it gets to the point that I'm breaking out the torch, I'm working on an outlier.
Recently there was a discussion [1] about direct drive hubless motor/wheel combo devices. This isn't that, but has some of the same issues I would be concerned with as a street e-bike.
I spent a number of years designing outer-runner direct drive permanent magnet motors for industrial equipment and I've got some questions.
Cheifly, bearings. They're not shown in any of the oh-wow images, but these will likely be the most expensive component of each motor. Big bearings are expensive, and to accept the loading of normal wheel operation, these will have to be pretty beefy. That's not even discussing operational life and maintenance.
After you've stuffed a pair of angular contact roller bearings into this "wheel", you're going to want to keep salt water and road grime from entering those bearings, so what do you use as a seal? Whatever you use is going to be big, expensive, and suck up huge amounts of power due to the large contact surface.
Finally, once you've got big ass bearings and big ass seals, how do you have enough room to put a decent amount of copper in there? Power in these things always amounts to maximizing the amount of copper in the space, and I just don't see room for it.
The way I understand hubless wheel designs (powered or not) is that you don't build them as one big bearing, wasting huge amounts of load bearing capacity in all parts of the rotation that aren't the ground contact point. I assume that the moving part is the rim is designed as a rail, with tiny trucks (as in the rail car component) riding on it that are fixed to the non-moving part. You'd have a high density of strong trucks near the floor, some at the three and nine o'clock positions for braking and acceleration force and perhaps some flimsy guiding on top. Those trucks would not necessarily require more sealing (outside their own small bearings) than the rail/wheel contact in railroads need sealing. And moving that rail a little hubward, behind a lip that extends rimward would already get you strong centripetal forces driving out all ingress in contact with the moving part, and adding some overpressure (that you might need for cooling anyways) would help even more. I think it could all remain contactless on that first, whole-wheel level, at least if you don't design for routine wading.
It absolutely matters. Every Watt of energy that doesn't become torque at a rotational velocity is just heat.
Contact seals work by contact and friction, friction generates heat proportional to linear velocity and linear velocity goes up proportionally with radius.
The motors I designed were intended for food production washdown areas, and if I were designing large motors for use in road environments, I would use a lot of similar methods, including high quality contact seals.
Teflon seals would probably have the required capabilities, but they will get destroyed by dust and grit. Nitrile seals would do it too with the detraction of a huge power loss at the seal. I wouldn't trust a plain labyrinth seal to do the job.
> Every Watt of energy that doesn't become torque at a rotational velocity is just heat.
Do you have any rough numbers to put on this? If there was 1000w of electrical power going to a wheel like this, what kind of heat loss are we talking? 5%, 10%, 30%?
Depends on the seal manufacturer. Those numbers are usually provided through their engineering data system. Their data will be fit to a particular tolerance for seal race surface finish, which will be influenced by the reality of manufacturing.
Allow me to embrace my engineer nature and hedge my bets. A contact seal of that size is usually specced for a power transmitting shaft. An (assumed) 20" shaft is going to transmit a huge amount of power. So much that the seal losses will be negligible. Those same losses would exist on any shaft/seal combo of that size, but would take a greater fraction of total motor power, given the size and power constraints given by an internal motor design.
Plus there's the unsprung mass. At least traditionally part of suspension performance is reducing the unsprung mass as much as possible because mass and spring rate inversely correlate.
I cannot speak to their actual means and methods. Maybe they've figured it out. But my experience designing and manufacturing similar products informs my skepticism.
I also look back in history and see many "revolutionary" technologies in the automotive/transportation space that didn't turn out as the inventors hoped. A veritable graveyard of "good on paper" ideas that failed due to the harsh realities of environment, maintenance, safety and manufacturing.
As I said in another comment, I want them to succeed. I am familiar with the great efficiency that a direct drive motor can offer. They can be great motors in the right application. But my evaluation of what I can glean through the marketing is that this particular product will end up in the graveyard.
You can use OnShape for free as long as you're OK with the models being publicly visible. I find that fine for learning and personal projects.
I've dabbled with OnShape, FreeCAD, and SolveSpace, and of them SolveSpace is the one I've ended up using the most. OnShape was nice, the GUI was pretty intuitive, I liked the way it worked, but I just feel weird trusting anything to a free plan on a cloud service. I don't really mind the public part, but it always felt tenuous that the plan would remain free so I didn't really feel like I could trust it long term.
FreeCAD was complicated and opaque, I never really put in the time to learn it, it just felt a bit clunky, but I keep meaning to come back to it.
SolveSpace seemed a bit mysterious at first, but just a bit of learning and I found myself pretty comfortable with it. It's not nearly as fully featured as some of the others, but it clicked well for me.
A cautionary note: Often times a food manufacturing plant will contract with and produce multiple brands on the same equipment. For instance, I've seen brand name, store label, and bargain brand waffles come off the same line, with the same equipment and using the same ingredient stocks.
Of course, an industrial food plant isn't going to have a searchable presence online. It is quite difficult to find out exactly what any such facility makes, let alone what brands come out of it.
Of course I can't speak for every factory or brand, but my experience tells me to try and be cognizant of where bad products are made in addition to the brands themselves.
"Store brand" products are an IMO egregious case of this. Often it's utterly impossible to tell where a product has been manufcatured (as in: plant or factory), and somewhat ironically, correlated product recalls are often the only way of establishing where a store sources its "in house" brands.
The fact is that "in house" isn't, and what both the merchant and manufacturer are in fact preserving is the market ignorance of who the ultimate producer is.
https://mynoise.net/