My £400 Dell Latitude is 5 years old, gets 12 hours of use a day and is dragged through some very dusty, dirty environments on a daily basis. All the keys are working.
If you make a consumer product that can't withstand basic consumer use then you're doing something wrong.
I'm with Uno Broadband who sell BT fibre lines (so upto 70 down/20 up) for around £40 a month with no blocks or restrictions and a static IP. No download limits to speak of either as I can easily hit 2TB download a month.
Almost done. They increased the UI friction for other services. Now you must make multiple clicks to open non Apple Music. You can't configure a standard service.
This is really annoying now. I was fine with having to do 2 clicks but making it inconvenient for me to open songs in my streaming service of choice is a pretty good way to never have me try the apple music service.
They do significantly more than this, even if you wanted to (incorrectly) classify all of their products like this, they actually do more than that to entice people in.
Just how likely is this to happen though, it would have to be the only light source and be flickering with exactly the same frequency as the machinery is traveling at (which i assume for most devices varies a lot).
Not saying it can't happen but it does seem stupidly hard to achieve.
It's not true that it has to be the only light source. All of the light sources have to be the same type and on the same circuit, which is fairly common.
Many AC motors are synchronized to the frequency of the power line, by the same principal that turbines in the power grid are. So 60hz AC often means 30hz = 1800 rpm motor, and 59.8hz AC means 29.9hz motor. So if you have LEDs with a half bridge rectifier and your machinery is 180 degree rotationally symmetric, it will appear to not be moving, even if the line frequency fluctuates.
Pretty common, about as common as the wagon wheel effect in 24fps film movies. In just the same way, the item can appear to stop, run slow, or run backwards, just as with film. No it does not have to be the only light source, just the nearest one to the machinery.
Fluorescent tubes are most noticeable, LEDs a little less. Tungsten or Halogen are the only sensible option for workpiece illumination.
Or, of course, just use a LED that properly smooths out the DC. It's not hard to do, and a quality LED manufacturer should get this right. The only excuse for flickering is a cheap LED that cuts cost for circuitry.
Oh I agree, but a surprising number of LED bulbs have some degree of flicker, even from those makes you might expect to do better. A purpose made work lamp should get it right though. Hopefully. Maybe.
For my hobby stuff, I just bought a couple of spare halogens that should see me out.
I would imagine there's a higher-than-average chance of this because most AC motors are definitely syncronized with the 60hz (or 50hz) AC source. There's a chance the lights might also derive from this.
> There's a chance the lights might also derive from this.
If the light is flickering it's absolutely guaranteed that it's derived from this.
But it's hard to imagine a lightbulb that emits a short enough pulse of light to make something look stopped. Even an absolute garbage one-way rectifier will be emitting light more than a quarter of the time. That can make a tool look odd, but it won't make it look still.
If the light is flickering it's absolutely guaranteed that it's derived from this.
Not necessarily. If it's a 50/60 or 100/120 Hz flicker then yes, but LED lights with a cheap switching power supply might still flicker at the switching frequency, which could be say 400Hz or something.
You have to be intentionally wasting money to put in a transformer big enough to handle 400Hz, and once you get into the lots of KHz where a supply like that is happy I think your "please don't explode" capacitor on the transformer is enough to prevent flicker.
It doesn't have to be going the exact same speed, a multiple would do the trick too. It can also be dangerous if it's close to the same rate since it can then look like it's going slower even if not stopped.
This is uncommon but not rare. Have you ever seen wheel blur or other artifacting of such? It's very easy to make happen artificially under controlled conditions which means it can't be that hard to happen accidentally.
Edited to add: Have you ever heard of a timing light for an engine? This works exactly the way you are describing.
Timing lights for engines work this way for clarity: The distributor on an engine has a spinning rotor and a number of points (one for each sparkplug) on the outside the circle the rotor forms while spinning are a series of contacts across which electricity jumps to send voltage to the spark plug.
The timing light is then pointed at the flywheel on an engine, which has numbers or marks stamped into it. Each time the spark plug fires the timing light (which is hooked into that same current via induction) lights up for a brief amount of time to show at what timing offset the engine is currently at. (this all happens at hundreds of rpms a minute).
The effect might not be rare but getting hurt by it is incredibly rare. Machines produce noise and vibration. Nobody is going to be fooled and try to pull a moving part out of a lathe because of some LED lighting except in the most exceptional or bizarre circumstances.
Machine shops are very loud (plus you'd be wearing ear protection) and a lathe/mill that vibrates noticeably is either broken or incapable of performing the very task its designed for.
Nobody? That is a high bar. Mechanics tend to be pretty cluey, but for the effort of getting proper lighting why nobody should be taking that sort of risk. Sight is one of those fundamental lets-feed-in-useful-information sensors for keeping situations safe.
Most people spec'ing out machine shops are not experts in lighting other than more = better. This is a really, really low risk we're talking about. Like basically the stars have to align for someone to get hurt.
Are there any statistics on this? That seems like the obvious way to settle this issue.
So far, the discussion sounds like it's a theoretical possibility. If it's a real possibility, then it's something that should have happened a number of times.
It's easy to miss those signs too. It's common to have earmuffs and sometimes a dust mask on when using power tools, and power switches often don't clearly indicate state. Many start/stop control boxes don't have any visual indication of state at all.
Someone might hear the noise and feel the vibration but think something is broken inside because the drill isn't rotating. I'm not sure exactly how that would lead to an accident but it might.
Multiple light source of the same general characteristic (don't even have to be the same type of bulb) may produce this result.
The rotation frequency would have to be close to a relatively simple multiple (or fraction) of AC frequency but the way electric motors are contstructed if the piece is directly connected to a motor it is very likely it is true.
An average middle-income family with two kids spends more than $200,000 to raise each child to age 17, followed by college costs (and/or any other support). In coastal cities, the number is more like $250k. That price is rising faster than inflation at about 3%, and college costs are rising 4%+. To begin with, let's just ignore college and just annualize it all to $15,000/year.
Merrill Lynch claims that an average retirement 'costs' about $740,000. Demographic breakdowns are much harder here, since they depend on both luck (health, mostly) and post-retirement location, so let's just use it as is.
The average age of first motherhood is 26, and fatherhood is 31. However, to my surprise, that's a bimodal distribution; let's use age 30 for our coastal/urban parents. The average age of retirement is apparently 63, so childrearing costs arrive 16-33 years before retirement costs. A stock market index fund held over the long term can reasonably expect perhaps 8% returns after inflation. Investing that $15k annually for 17 years should produce a retirement nest-egg of a bit over $2,000,000.
I tried to be pretty generous with my math here; paying for college, going from zero to one kid, or adjusting for cost growth all worsen the picture quite a bit. (Having >2 kids or living off the coasts improves it somewhat.) But the really damning part is that kids may not take care of you at all (it's a pretty heavy expectation), and even if they do most people face needs and expenses family can't take care of. If you have health needs that require regular care from a nurse, much less costly surgery, your kids are only going to be able to help by putting up money. And quite a few health problems like severe dementia make living at home with family nearly impossible by requiring full-time monitoring.
Living with family is probably a much better experience than living in a nursing home, and of course it's inherently rewarding for a lot of people. The data is irreparably confounded, but I wouldn't be shocked if people with kids are healthier and even longer-lived than comparable people without them. But there's really no salvaging the idea that having a family substitutes for an expensive retirement.
I think we've also lost sight of something else in this kids-vs-no-kids argument: few kids.
Studies probably do show that people with kids are healthier and longer-lived than childfree people. And "sucking it up" and having a kid or two like someone above says can give you this. However, this still results in a declining population, remember, which is what the main article was talking about in the first place. Every couple having 1 kid isn't going to maintain the population, for obvious reasons, and not even 2 will do it (you have to have an average of 2.1-2.2).
Now add to this the fact that more and more people aren't even getting married in the first place (which is improving the divorce rate), and not having kids, not necessarily because they don't want them, but because they can't find a suitable partner. I see this all the time here in the DC area on the dating sites: women who are 35+, frequently 40+, sometimes even 45+, saying they're never married, have no kids, but want them. 45 is a little old for a woman to have kids, and most likely if she hasn't found a man to her liking by that age, she never will.
> I think we've also lost sight of something else in this kids-vs-no-kids argument: few kids.
This is a good point.
Even on the callous ROI level I was looking at, 1-2 kids is a particularly weird span. The first kid is most expensive and life-altering, so someone viewing kids as a retirement plan would almost certainly want to have a bunch of them. They're 'cheaper', it hedges against a kid not not taking care of you (for any of numerous reasons from a bad relationship to health problems of their own), and it makes providing care much more doable as a shared responsibility.
Honestly, a whole lot of social norms we took for granted actually seem to rely on families having 3+ kids who grow up to live nearby. Some mix of "community support" and "network effects" mean that the difficulty of raising kids has gone up substantially as family size and proximity have gone down.
Why does childrearing look so hard and expensive these days? Well, you probably don't live near family members with their own kids; my grandparents freed up time by trading 'daycare' with their multiple siblings who all had families.
Why does taking care of parents seem so rare and demanding? (Partly because we've improved longevity ahead of good health, so there are more parents who genuinely need specialized care. But also...) It's relatively easy to have a parent move across town into the spare bedroom that freed up when your kids moved out, and have your siblings come over when you're out of town. It's way harder to uproot your parents to come live in your one-bedroom apartment, or leave your job and friends to move back home and care for them alone.
Alzheimers patients need 24/7 care. This isn't something that small families with 3-4 siblings can do by reasonable means next to having a job, raising the next generation, and living in the neighbouring town or even further than that. In the old days, poor people just died young because of exhaustion and rich people well they have the means for proper care per definition.
There is indeed a lot of research on Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. But I'm a bit more sceptical than you. We still don't know exactly what's happening in Alzheimer patients. We might even split up the disease into multiple sub-diseases as it happened with cancer. However, you are right, a lot of stuff can happen before people who are young today (20s and younger) get old.
My Nokia 7.1 has monthly updates guaranteed for two years, is fast with a decent camera and has all the apps I need. Battery life and build quality are fantastic. All for about a quarter of the price of an iPhone XR. Not sure I agree with you there.
I'm considering a Nokia 6.1 or 7.1 as my next phone, but I'm concerned that it's allegedly killing background processes so that IMs don't get delivered. Can you comment on that?
My sister is non tech savvy and thus loves to complain about things not working on her phone or computer. She has a 6.1 and no complaints on that regard.
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