Programmer, Mathematician, Gamer. Occasionally, I exercise and eat well. If I'm feeling outgoing, I'll look at your shoes when we speak.
Programmer, Mathematician, Gamer. Occasionally, I exercise and eat well. If I'm feeling outgoing, I'll look at your shoes when we speak.
The runaway ramp is essentially filled with a ton of not-easily-compacted gravel. When you start driving down the ramp, the tires sink (a LOT) because of the weight of the vehicle. The force required to compact and push the gravel out of the way of the semi slows the semi down. Most of these ramps ALSO go uphill, so gravity is slowing the truck down as well.
Try running along a patch of asphalt, then into beach sand. You slow down very quickly. Same phenomenon -- just maximized with science.
break the engine by trying*
so you use normal braking to decrease your speed to the next 5mph marker and reset the HDC.
Doing this you'll be using normal braking only once or twice for about 15 or 20 seconds per mountainous down-slope. Your normal brakes will be completely fine. No possibility to overheat.
If you're driving a fully-manual semi, you have to downshift yourself to manage this.
Yes. After you get past a certain speed you'd just brake the engine by trying.
The typical procedure is to use Hill Descent Control (a special cruise control for semis going downhill). You first slow down (via normal braking) to about 5 mph below the maximum speed you want to go, then you downshift, then you set your cruise control. The software will then use the transmission and the engine to try to maintain your speed.
If you exceed the speed you set by 3 mph or more, you're going too fast..
He likely over-used the bakes so much they essentially melted (probably over the course of 3 mountains or something). Air brake or hydraulic doesn't matter here. They're still friction-based brakes. All such brakes will fail if you get them too hot.
As for why they fail due to heat -- when you're trying to slow down 80,000+ lbs of vehicle over the course of 2-3 hours and you're doing it by rubbing metal together ... it gets too hot. Once it gets hot enough, the metal turns almost to liquid and friction doesn't appreciably slow down the vehicle. There's even brake check areas at the beginning of most of these long down-hill areas across the Rocky mountains and people just don't use them. If they did, the smell alone would tell them to stop.
Almost always this is because the driver has been over-using the brakes over a long period of time. They don't fail instantly, or even on 1 or 2 mountain down-slopes. They only fail (due to heat) if the driver is over-using the brakes for an extended period of time.
Whats worse is that you can easily avoid this situation by simply down-shifting the semi and allowing the engine to decelerate the vehicle. Hill Descent Control does it for you automatically.
Tow truck with a long cable.
This is neat. Do they use chains, a hoist, or a crane to load it?
In the USA, they're supposed to be secured by blocks at either end of the roll. They help (marginally) if the chains are also tightly secured to the trailer. If everything is secured correctly, the roll won't come off the truck even if it is upside down and hanging over the ground. Most of them require 5 commonly-used chains to properly secure them (at the minimum). If I see fewer than 5, I stay away from the vehicle.
Or too few. Using 3x 5,000 lbs rated chains to secure a 40,000 lbs round object is a fool's errand. If you put 4 on there, you're technically legal in the USA -- but I'd be adding at least 5, if not 7, if there was space to do so. (Only half the weight is technically required to be strapped in the USA.)
Seems like a simpler, more realistic way to ensure safety would be to hold the COMPANY responsible for training, maintenance, load securement training and supplies, etc. It's literally the way that any other safety-conscious job works -- an employee at a refinery will get in trouble if they don't follow safety regulations, but the company holds massive liability and will get into much worse trouble if there's anything they haven't done that they should have.
Ah, but the company they are working for provides the truck, the trailer, the chains, the binders, etc. Blaming the truck driver for ANYTHING that goes wrong, or could go wrong en-route simply encourages companies to not give a flying flip about safety. Each truck driver has to be the gatekeeper for safely pre-tripping the vehicle, ensuring maintenance is up-to-date, checking loading is done properly, transporting the load, ensuring the receiver doesn't do something stupid while unloading, etc.
Yes.
Well, I learned that there is a phrase for one of my main complaints against web-serial authors ... besides just constantly slaughtering grammar, tense, and continuity, idiot plots seem to be extremely common in most web novels.
So in the above, it's probably "(male) the whatever", "(female) the whatever", "(neutral) the whatever". For English we don't often associate a sex with every object, but there are some exceptions: boats and ships are always female. So, if you want to say "the boat" using the french "the", you'd say "la boat". But (if say toilets were male), you'd say "le toilet".
I -o, you -as, he/she/they -a, we -amos, they (plural) -an
So, the verb amar (to love) becomes: amo (I love), amas (you love), ama (he/she/they love), amamos (we love), aman (they love). This works for any verb that ends in -ar in spanish (there are generally only three endings for verbs so this correlates to roughly 1/3 of spanish verbs!).
This is also a significant reason that spanish is considered more "romantic" than english -- the common verb endings makes poetry / songs easier to rhyme.
We conjugate verbs in English. We have "I dance", "He/She dances", "They dance" (singular), "They dance" (plural), "We dance", etc.
A lot of English verbs conjugate to the same word across different subject-types. This is also not the case for a lot of other languages.
In Spanish, for present tense verbs, of the -ar type, the conjugations are as follows:
"The" is the definite article. It means "this particular one". "A" is an indefinite article. It means "one of a class of things".
So, "the dog" means a particular dog. "A dog" means just some dog (ie not a cat / bird / etc).
In English, you don't conjugate the definite article. So, there is no special from of "the" depending upon what it refers to "the man", "the girl", "the person" all use the exact same word. This is not the case in other languages.
Those things are extremely efficient (better usage of the power from the diesel) compared to the trucking industry. That's where the real cost increases are coming.
Also, most food and even most consumer goods are shipped almost exclusively by truck. Trains tend to get heavy, or industrial freight because timelines for these products are longer, the heavier weight is less costly to transport by rail, or the item is needed in ridiculous bulk at extremely low cost (sand, for instance).
(usually on one semi truck before getting switched at the border to another one)*
Very much so. Almost all our produce is from either California, Mexico, or Central America (somewhere). The vast, vast majority of that crosses the border (usually on one semi truck), then is shipped from wherever to very close to your supermarket, then to your supermarket. All of it is done with diesel trucks.
Almost all consumer goods make the same trek. The vast majority of cost increases since 2021 are due to compounded costs from diesel increases.
Lego doesn't deserve being associated with him.
I-69? I-610? If the first, then that interchange also serves I-45 and TX-288, goes right through downtown, and distributes traffic, in total, between 7 out of 8 freeways leading out from the city.
I'll try to post an image showing how critical it is in a comment below...
Woo pig, sue-e?
Further: LLMs are just super-fing-fancy copy-paste machines where the copy operation takes the form of spaghetti from hell from the training data. They don't actually understand, or know, anything. They regurgitate training data that's gone through an insanely complex blender.
It's not that good. It's incredibly slow-paced. It had the same problem of Stargate: Universe ... not enough plot to justify its existence. Serenity was great.
Those were the first-settled areas. They were pushing into foreign lands with ... like a wooden-ship's-worth of people (or maybe three ships' worth) and then declaring it theirs. The resulting mish-mash is more "where do you end up on a boat if you sail west from Europe" than "someone planned this well."
Just look at the shape of Maryland.