I took a bit of a break from doing software full time (mostly contracting). I spend the past 18 months working in a casino, and learned much more than one would think. I'm looking to find something in the software field, although I don't think I want to write software all day.
I worked at Cycorp as a contractor for a few months. Lenat was, without a doubt, the smartest person I ever met in my life. There are levels of scary smart... his intelligence was downright frightening.
I'm sad to see so many call his work a failure. His work was anything but a failure. I think this perception comes down to the fact that the company worked on many things that aren't public, and he do much publicity and self-promotion.
The city has to then add trucks to cover this downtime. It's not only the 3 hours of charging every day, it's the time the truck takes to drive to a station, so maybe 4 hours a day.
NYC has 2800 snow plows. They would have to increase their fleet another 33% or so. That's 900 to 1000 trucks for a tax-funded service. This extra cost excludes the change in logistics, etc.
Plus the fact that the streets are full of snow at the time which in addition to making the whole thing timely complicates things logistically quite a bit.
What if the city added batteries instead of plows? Have recharging stations that swapped batteries. Requires building the plows around hot swappable batteries and a station with some fixed hydraulics that can drop them in and out. Requires a bit of redundancy by having multiple stations to swap batteries and something like forklifts to drag them around and charge the spent batteries. Probably not a good consumer solution, but this is an industry, so industrial solutions would work fine.
What if we had some type of fluid that carried potential energy that we could quickly pour into a giant tank on the trucks?
Some things will just never go electric. Like fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, power company trucks, etc. that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation. Dead dinosaurs are the best answer for some problems, just not every car on the road.
Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
> ambulances
Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
> tow trucks
Perhaps the only one that would be bad given the amount of power required to tow a vehicle.
> power company trucks
Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment and they are always working on electrical things.
> that have to be able to function for weeks at a time in a grid down situation.
Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
There are few places where EVs are bad fits. The main ones are airplanes and ships where getting power is hard and the power density needs to be high.
For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
- Fire departments cannot afford to have their apparatus out-of-service for hours while they recharge.
- The truck alone weighs around 10,000-15,000 lbs, without water, and they carry anywhere from ~500 gallons of water (attack engines) to upwards of ~2600 gallons (tenders). That’s 14,175lbs to 36,710lbs of truck.
- The engine powers the apparatus itself, its pumps, and often, a huge alternator for its electrical systems, and an inverter supplying 110V for use with fans, portable lighting, etc. It has to do this for hours.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
There is a several order-of-magnitude difference between the power required to service the station, dispatch, etc, as opposed to what’s required to rapidly recharge the kind of massive batteries an EV fire apparatus would require.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Local government maintains diesel generators and a fuel supply to handle this kind of extreme infrastructure failure.
> For everything semi-truck and smaller, batteries have a high enough capacity to service today.
Fire trucks aren’t semis. They have very different energy demands, usage patterns, risk profiles, and failure modes.
Are you serious?! If my town loses power for two weeks I want fire trucks, ambulances, tow trucks, and especially power company trucks to work! Civic infrastructure should anticipate tail events.
> How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
And you need a giant generator to charge any large vehicle in a reasonable amount of time, not just a generator that can keep the electricity on in the building.
The fire apparatus I’ve worked on have a 120V inlet called a shoreline to keep equipment (MDT, radios, cardiac monitor, portable suction, and Lucas battery chargers, interior lighting, etc) operational at station without draining the battery.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
Okay, work out the size of a generator needed to power one truck vs the dispatch offices. Now tell us how many generators you need.
Ever heard of diesel-electric drive trains? The vehicles have electric motors at the wheels and a much smaller then usual internal combustion engine that is an onboard generator.
You can have both at once. This is what happens with some trains, frequently happens in mining, and happens in some large industries. It is what occurs with hybrid electric vehicles.
The latest round of electric vehicles are getting 80km (50 miles) off the battery. That sort of thing is find for most of the service vehicle types you listed, and meets the requirements for greening a fleet and having alternative power options.
> Gravity. Siphons. Manual pumps. Etc. Real complicated stuff known since figuratively Roman times.
This is one of those statements that sounds reasonable when its you with your consumer-grade whatever, and has absolutely no relevance to large scale logistics and planning.
Fuel in ground tanks when the black out starts is...fuel in the ground tanks which is going to stay there because no amount of human labor is getting enough of it out to keep multiple trucks going.
Fuel in ground tanks can be pumped out by manually pumping enough to power a generator to power the regular pumps... which is pretty trivial to set up.
> Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
Yeah, so I don’t know much of anything about NYC, but I used to live in Chicago and did some volunteer work that put me in a fire station for a few hours every few months. Fire trucks are busy vehicles. They probably would indeed be excellent EVs, but they get used a lot (even if actual fires are rare). Also, firefighters are used to plugging them in! Modern fire stations maintain good internal air quality by having an exhaust system that connects a hose to the diesel exhaust of the fire truck when it comes into the station and detaches when it leaves.
On the other hand, an extended family member is the fire chief in a small western town. Those fire trucks would be terrible EVs, as they spend days or weeks at a time out in the field dealing with large scale wildfires.
Target response times for fire trucks are measured in minutes. Fire damage increases on an exponential curve, a couple minutes can make a huge difference when lives and homes are on the line.
EVs are a great technology for urban settings in moderate weather conditions, like in the big California cities where travel needs can be predicted, e.g. I travel < 40 miles/day and can recharge at home overnight.
Jamming them into applications for which they are not yet viable is a recipe for failure. People will only tolerate so much cost and inconvenience for the sake of climate change, it is important we not waste it on foolishness, because it's of urgent importance that we succeed in addressing it.
> ambulances [are] Generally low mileage vehicles, no idea why you'd not be able to use them as EVs.
Because they are neither low mileage and the medical equipment behind needs power. You never want your battery to go flat in an ambulance and lose the mobility and life support at the same time. Also, they're used the way EVs hate most. Accelerate and decelerate constantly while trying to plow through traffic in city centers and rush hours.
> fire trucks Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage...
I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?
> power company trucks [are] Excellent option for EVs because they almost never haul equipment
I don't know how yours operate but the power company trucks I see carry a whole workshop behind, and some of them carries enough spare parts to build a sizeable transformer from scratch. If we are talking about cranes, their hydraulics will consume enough energy to affect their mileage considerably.
> Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have.
You'd need a couple of 1.2MVA generators to charge these vehicles if you want to do it quickly, with redundancy. And these things are neither small, nor silent or can be deployed anywhere you like. We have a couple of them outside, and boy, they're literally shipping container sized things. This excludes the fuel tanks and other infrastructure they need to be able to generate electricity.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
Uh, just pour fuel to the tanks or pump with a manual pump?
> I wouldn't want an inextinguishable box of lithium near something hot like a fire. Would you?
This.
My brother is a captain for a fire department. I visited the hall many times with him and found the station design odd. He told me it is built that way because there have been cases of fire trucks being too close to major fires, and the truck catching fire back at the station.
The station has "blast doors" that automatically close if the bay is on fire to protect the rest of the station. (sounds funny right.. fire halls catching fire??)
Not sure they would want a "flammable metals" fire in their bay.
And how do they deal with the tank of explosive fluids inside fire trucks today?
Precautions around keeping a fuel tank from catching fire work the same for batteries. Better, because lithium batteries have an ignition temperature at 2000F and gasoline's is 500F and diesel at 410F.
This is a shockingly high amount of FUD but little facts.
Lets start at the top shall we?
Diesel doesn't "burn" like gasoline does.
"If you toss a lit match into a puddle of diesel fuel, it'll go out."
You need to atomize it first, or heat it up a lot so it starts to "flash" or it wont "burn".
So, a firetruck with a large diesel tank is fairly safe because it takes a LOT to get it to start burning. At first all the heat is simply absorbed by the diesel slowing warming it up until it reaches its flash point.
Next, your temperatures are beyond MESSED UP.
Ignition temperature for a lithium battery is just 121 C
> Would be excellent EVs. They have super low millage and you'd not have to worry about things like stagnant fuel.
There is no "/s" so it is hard to tell if you are being sarcastic or not. Assuming you are not... EV's make TERRIBLE fire trucks.
How long does it take to fuel a fire truck? How long to recharge one?
You are blissfully unaware of how fire trucks work. Many are also diesel pumps, they arrive at fires and the truck itself is a massive water pump. Tell us, how many hours can a EV drive the water pump for? The diesel version can probably run for several days if needed.
My brother is a firefighter, they are AFRAID of electric vehicle fires because well.. Something about electricity + water?
If i call 911, i expect a fire truck to arrive, not some BS about how they had a power failure and their rechargeable truck isn't working.
PS - Stagnant fuel isn't a real thing. Fire trucks are generally very well maintained, they are expensive, they are essential life saving machines. They don't just sit somewhere forgotten and have their fuel go "bad".
They are driven almost daily because firefighters are expected to know their area and so they drive around to see where hydrants are, look at new subdivisions and sometimes simply to make sure it runs property.
They also have detailed logbooks and are inspected a LOT.
>Generators are a thing that pretty much every one of these services will have. Because you can't have a fire station, EMT dispatch, etc go dark because of a grid down situation.
> And, consider this when thinking of a "grid down" situation. How do you pump fuel if the grid is down?
First.. Fire stations use batteries then generators.
Second, you point out they have generators.. wouldn't that be used to transfer fuel answering your own question?
What this basically does is (in a grid-down situation) is move the fuel usage from the truck's engine to the station's generator, greatly limiting the vehicles overall mobility precisely when they might be most needed.
There are many stations already, every few blocks. And the company running them, Citibike, already wants to connect them to the grid. Now you have a more tractable problem: when there's snow coming, some of the (many) unused bike racks can be dedicated to recharge truck batteries instead. I don't know what the hydraulics would look like and if that's something that can be installed seasonally or perhaps just a few days in advance.
There are many more bike stations than truck depots. You could conceivably swap batteries multiple times during a 12h shift without having to make detours. And if you know there's going to be a lot of plowing, you could place batteries throughout the city ahead of time. Heavy storms rarely show up without warning signs. Elsewhere I suggested stockpiling batteries from other non-essential vehicles, so you don't need excessive redundant capacity that sits idle 95% of the year. That's why repurposing bike stations could help: you're not stuck with a lot of infrastructure that is needed only 5% of the year.
Wouldn't a lot of the extra cost for the 33% more trucks get canceled out by each one getting driven that much less, so requiring less maintenance and lasting longer? Other than the part of depreciation that happens because of age rather than mileage/usage, what costs would remain?
I'm not even sure depreciation matters with these anyway! Idk how much of a resale market there is. You might just run it into the ground and then scrap it.
I'm working on getting back into programming. I took a break after burning out.
My main love of software has always been writing programs that deal with music and audio. I'm going to spend more time writing plugins and building out more of my ontological approach to music theory, and eventually work on more evaluation models.
There is a sinister underpinning to the pay-for-stream stuff. The "influencer / musician" gets penalized hard for boosting Spotify streams (*), then they go on social media and complain that they only make $10 for 1M streams, and attempt to promote other "more ethical" platforms.
In my own accounts, my Spotify streams pay just as much as any other platform. The tricks used for standard influencer accounts don't work for musicians, probably because you can't trick people into believing you make good music when it is clearly garbage.
(*) I should be more clear on what I mean. A stream in the US would pay about 1/2c for each stream, while a stream from Eastern Europe would pay far less. Of course, these streaming farms are located in these areas.
I'm curious how you can to this conclusion. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were always vehicles for advertisers. I suppose it was more acceptable because it was from "influencer marketing," which was taken so far that the FTC had to step in and start fining influencers for dishonest marketing.
I guess it is different than "we are interrupting your current show for this important topic," but to be honest, I think the new style of marketing is more sinister. We can expect a TV or radio station to show ads and understand it doesn't exactly reflect the thoughts of the stations. In "influencer marketing," we are led to believe that some 16 year old really knows more about the stock market and crypto than those Wall Street guys.
TV created influencer marketing. Since before social networks existed products would make appearances in shows. See Sheldon drink a coke in big bang theory, that was paid for. See someone shopping at a particular store in a mall, paid for.
I was in construction in my 20s. I earned $X when I was learning. A few years later, I was working independent and earning $Y. It ended up that $Y was lower than $X. This is akin to earning less as a senior dev than you did as a junior dev, except you'd also have to buy your own chair, desk, computer, and software license to work as a sr dev.
The problem was multifold, and I think the crux of the situation. The people who entered the field didn't respect the field, and only aimed to undercut the next guy, causing wages to plummet in the span of 5 years.
Software doesn't need that much protection yet, but that slide happens way faster than you think it will. It's not about keeping people out; it's about educating those who come in to respect the industry they are entering. Many people are actively preventing people from learning about the proper value of their work.
I see no problem with people competing for work by lowering their bid? Sounds like you’re encouraging cartel-like behavior (which is, for example, why a pit of real estate agents still get paid 5-6% in a transaction despite clearly not being worth that, on average).
During the past few months, I've learned some NodeJS and VueJS. I'm currently learning how to build audio plugins, using C++.
I've mainly been out of work for the past 2 years, so I'm a little rusty. I'm terrible at front-end, not for lack of trying, so I wouldn't be able to do f/e or full stack.
Remote: Okay
Relocate? No
Tech: Python, Clojure, C++, Node
Resume / CV: https://butternotes.com, https://github.com/dt1
I took a bit of a break from doing software full time (mostly contracting). I spend the past 18 months working in a casino, and learned much more than one would think. I'm looking to find something in the software field, although I don't think I want to write software all day.
email: dbtoomey@gmail.com