Outsource culture

LionAquaLooper

snowblind said:

We're kinda reaching the end run for the use of money. It is becoming more problematic to continue to think to think of everything in financial terms. EVs are a classic example. Climate change is a problem which is already affecting "the bottom line". Government hates them because they lose all the lovely tax revenues from fuel sales. They also lose all the other indirect income like congestion charges/emissions taxes etc. Add in the greater wear and tear on road infrastructure due to the cars being heavier and they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.Similarly if half the workforce now sits at home the demand for public transport is reduced so all the rail/bus companies end up getting starved of revenue and they will go knocking on the gov't's door for subsidies and support. Everyone needs to satisfy the demands of shareholders who are essentially parasites, producing nothing themselves but still a drain on resources. The drive to maintain profitability then leads to shortcuts in critical areas like the quality of the food supply which leads to an unhealthy general population and thence to reduced productivity and so it goes.

Maybe time to start considering a different way of doing things?

If only.  First you gotta assure the people who have the most money that they won't lose out in the new world.  Unfortunately it's these same people who call the shots.  So something tells me it will be easier to convince Americans to hand over their guns than it is to convince the 1% to stop using money.

digitalscream

Sporky said:

snowblind said:

Add in the greater wear and tear on road infrastructure due to the cars being heavier 

That's not actually a thing.

Even a 3-tonne car has almost no impact compared to a lorry.

True, but 33 million of them - versus 400k lorries - has to have an impact, especially on roads which weren't designed for regular use by vehicles of that kind of weight.

snowblind

Plus reinforcing all the multi-storey car parks which can't take the weight.

monquixote

snowblind said:

Plus reinforcing all the multi-storey car parks which can't take the weight.

If they have that little margin for additional weight then we have bigger problems 

TTony

snowblind said:

We're kinda reaching the end run for the use of money. It is becoming more problematic to continue to think to think of everything in financial terms. EVs are a classic example. Climate change is a problem which is already affecting "the bottom line". Government hates them because they lose all the lovely tax revenues from fuel sales. They also lose all the other indirect income like congestion charges/emissions taxes etc. Add in the greater wear and tear on road infrastructure due to the cars being heavier and they are stuck between a rock and a hard place.Similarly if half the workforce now sits at home the demand for public transport is reduced so all the rail/bus companies end up getting starved of revenue and they will go knocking on the gov't's door for subsidies and support. Everyone needs to satisfy the demands of shareholders who are essentially parasites, producing nothing themselves but still a drain on resources. The drive to maintain profitability then leads to shortcuts in critical areas like the quality of the food supply which leads to an unhealthy general population and thence to reduced productivity and so it goes.

Which thread were you aiming for?

(I think you missed).

Roland

“Those bloody muskets are taking away the need for trained archers.” Change is a fact of life. I agree that finance driven offshoring has caused problems. Change is rarely easy, and mistakes are made. Short term financial horizons is one of them. On the other hand Apple, Amazon, and Google, to name a few, have made long term investments in market share. We complain about them too, but for different reasons.

Sporky

digitalscream said:

Sporky said:

snowblind said:

Add in the greater wear and tear on road infrastructure due to the cars being heavier 

That's not actually a thing.

Even a 3-tonne car has almost no impact compared to a lorry.

True, but 33 million of them - versus 400k lorries - has to have an impact, especially on roads which weren't designed for regular use by vehicles of that kind of weight.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads

The sums exist and say "no". Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.

A 1.5-tonne car has 0.75 tonnes per axle (let's assume even weight distribution because anything else is just as dodgy an asssumption), to the 4th power that's about 0.32.
A 2-tonne car gets you 1.
A 3-tonne car goes to a hair over 5.

5 looks a lot more than 0.32 until you see where the damage is actually done.

A 2-axle lorry is restricted to 17 tonnes, so it scores up to 5,220.
A 3-axle lorry is restricted to 25 tonnes, and scores 4,800ish.
A 40-tonne lorry with 5 axles gets 4,096.

Plus trucks tend to have higher duty cycles than cars (ie each truck spends a lot more time on the road than each car). But all the trucks are doing thousands of times the damage that the heaviest cars are.

digitalscream

Sporky said:

digitalscream said:

Sporky said:

snowblind said:

Add in the greater wear and tear on road infrastructure due to the cars being heavier 

That's not actually a thing.

Even a 3-tonne car has almost no impact compared to a lorry.

True, but 33 million of them - versus 400k lorries - has to have an impact, especially on roads which weren't designed for regular use by vehicles of that kind of weight.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads

The sums exist and say "no". Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.

A 1.5-tonne car has 0.75 tonnes per axle (let's assume even weight distribution because anything else is just as dodgy an asssumption), to the 4th power that's about 0.32.
A 2-tonne car gets you 1.
A 3-tonne car goes to a hair over 5.

A 2-axle lorry is restricted to 17 tonnes, so it scores up to 5,220.
A 3-axle lorry is restricted to 25 tonnes, and scores 4,800ish.
A 40-tonne lorry with 5 axles gets 4,096.

Plus trucks tend to have higher duty cycles than cars (ie each truck spends a lot more time on the road than each car).

OK, so we're getting waaaay off-topic here, but...if that were the case, then roads which never have lorries or trucks on them would basically last forever (aside from normal environmental damage).

The streets in my town would somewhat disagree. You'd be hard pressed to find any stretch of more than 200m without at least one pothole on it...in fact, the roads with the least potholes and cracks are the main roads in and out, which do have lorries up and down regularly. A huge proportion of the damaged roads have been completely resurfaced at some point in the last 20 years.

That would suggest something else is going on here, and it ain't lorries. Quality of materials and workmanship? Very likely. However, that's also going to affect how susceptible it is to vehicles of lower weight.

Therein lies the rub - the tests you referenced are well-known to be problematic, precisely because not all roads are made the same, and Googling around it looks like it's pretty much accepted in the construction industry that the results don't extrapolate well past the very specific road construction used in the tests (which, near as I can tell, was based on a US highway). Yes, the wear is related to the fourth power rule, but it's not negligible for a car on every kind of road. Especially with the penny-pinching, built-down-to-the-lowest-cost approach taken in the UK for the last 15 years.

TTony

digitalscream said:

OK, so we're getting waaaay off-topic here, but...if that were the case, then roads which never have lorries or trucks on them would basically last forever (aside from normal environmental damage).

That's the problem when you bring scientists and statistics into a debate ...

Not all roads are made equal.  You really wouldn't want them to be - it'd be far too expensive.

Major roads which are expected to bear a significant volume of traffic, including heavy vehicles, are made to a very different standard to roads which are made for a less onerous purpose.

Apply the fourth power rule to roads intended to carry the mix and volume of traffic of motorways and main A roads, and it'll hold (ish).  But it's not a valid rule to apply to the majority of residential roads, nor even the non-through routes in any town because those roads weren't built to meet that spec.  If you put motorway levels of trucks on your local road, you'd not be complaining about potholes so much as the road completely disappearing.

You also have to consider who pays for the maintenance.  Your cash-strapped local council doesn't fund the maintenance on the major routes, but does have to fund fixing the potholes on your road.  Which is why they don't get fixed - properly or very often.

Sporky

I do love when people argue with the science because it doesn't support their position. 

TTony

Sporky said:

I do love when people argue with the science because it doesn't support their position. 

Yeah, but science is so often wrong.

monquixote

digitalscream said:

Sporky said:

digitalscream said:

Sporky said:

snowblind said:

Add in the greater wear and tear on road infrastructure due to the cars being heavier 

That's not actually a thing.

Even a 3-tonne car has almost no impact compared to a lorry.

True, but 33 million of them - versus 400k lorries - has to have an impact, especially on roads which weren't designed for regular use by vehicles of that kind of weight.

https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads

The sums exist and say "no". Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.

A 1.5-tonne car has 0.75 tonnes per axle (let's assume even weight distribution because anything else is just as dodgy an asssumption), to the 4th power that's about 0.32.
A 2-tonne car gets you 1.
A 3-tonne car goes to a hair over 5.

A 2-axle lorry is restricted to 17 tonnes, so it scores up to 5,220.
A 3-axle lorry is restricted to 25 tonnes, and scores 4,800ish.
A 40-tonne lorry with 5 axles gets 4,096.

Plus trucks tend to have higher duty cycles than cars (ie each truck spends a lot more time on the road than each car).

OK, so we're getting waaaay off-topic here, but...if that were the case, then roads which never have lorries or trucks on them would basically last forever (aside from normal environmental damage).

The streets in my town would somewhat disagree. You'd be hard pressed to find any stretch of more than 200m without at least one pothole on it...in fact, the roads with the least potholes and cracks are the main roads in and out, which do have lorries up and down regularly. A huge proportion of the damaged roads have been completely resurfaced at some point in the last 20 years.

That would suggest something else is going on here, and it ain't lorries. Quality of materials and workmanship? Very likely. However, that's also going to affect how susceptible it is to vehicles of lower weight.

Therein lies the rub - the tests you referenced are well-known to be problematic, precisely because not all roads are made the same, and Googling around it looks like it's pretty much accepted in the construction industry that the results don't extrapolate well past the very specific road construction used in the tests (which, near as I can tell, was based on a US highway). Yes, the wear is related to the fourth power rule, but it's not negligible for a car on every kind of road. Especially with the penny-pinching, built-down-to-the-lowest-cost approach taken in the UK for the last 15 years.

I think a very significant part of road damage is weather related. Especially freezing. 

Sporky

TTony said:

Sporky said:

I do love when people argue with the science because it doesn't support their position. 

Yeah, but science is so often wrong.

Indeed. What do extensive research and testing have, in the face of anecdata, supposition, and whataboutery? 

VimFuego

Jetsam1 said:

Isn't that the dream of all corporate board level types? No employees to pay? Apart from a few mates and then a few skilled techs to keep things running.

long time back I read a book called Beggars In Spain, a near future sci fi novel where the society the author created was just like that. A small handful of mega wealthy elites being serviced by a small handful of highly skilled and paid employees and the vast bulk of the world's population living on a basic income sedated chemically and through the media into a bovine like compliance. 
Quite looking forwards to it if I'm honest.

Offset

VimFuego said:

Jetsam1 said:

Isn't that the dream of all corporate board level types? No employees to pay? Apart from a few mates and then a few skilled techs to keep things running.

long time back I read a book called Beggars In Spain, a near future sci fi novel where the society the author created was just like that. A small handful of mega wealthy elites being serviced by a small handful of highly skilled and paid employees and the vast bulk of the world's population living on a basic income sedated chemically and through the media into a bovine like compliance. 
Quite looking forwards to it if I'm honest.

But into which of those strata will you fall Vim?! 

digitalscream

Sporky said:

I do love when people argue with the science because it doesn't support their position. 

Not at all. Even the US Army Engineering Corps decided that the AASHO test was so limited in scope that it was practically useless anywhere outside that scope:

https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/api/collection/p266001coll1/id/4079/download

The main reason is that the PSI method requires assumptions about the most critical components of the road constructions which are - in their words "usually not true".

And yet...it would appear that not only is that ignored when it's used as a rule of thumb, it's extrapolated far past the scope of the original experiment.

snowblind

Back to the original post I suspect part of the problem is the mathematical gymnastics that are performed to make outsourcing appealing to someone. The goal is only ever to try to offset a cost and either transfer it to someone else or simply hide it so it can be ignored. Often the trick is to narrow the field of consideration and ignore wider interactions. 

Thermodynamics says that everything has a cost in terms of energy. Where and how that energy is expended can be moved around but overall the cost remains the same for any given task. If you can find a way to avoid footing the bill for the energy then while you can perceive a win it does mean someone else has lost out. It then becomes a consideration of how long before that loss finds it way back through some other indirect route.

VimFuego

Offset said:

VimFuego said:

Jetsam1 said:

Isn't that the dream of all corporate board level types? No employees to pay? Apart from a few mates and then a few skilled techs to keep things running.

long time back I read a book called Beggars In Spain, a near future sci fi novel where the society the author created was just like that. A small handful of mega wealthy elites being serviced by a small handful of highly skilled and paid employees and the vast bulk of the world's population living on a basic income sedated chemically and through the media into a bovine like compliance. 
Quite looking forwards to it if I'm honest.

But into which of those strata will you fall Vim?! 

if I'm not in the sedated and bovine group like then there's gonna be some major teddies out the pram!!!

Sporky

digitalscream said:

Sporky said:

I do love when people argue with the science because it doesn't support their position. 

Not at all. Even the US Army Engineering Corps decided that the AASHO test was so limited in scope that it was practically useless anywhere outside that scope:

Having read both, the fourth power thing is still valid for its intended use, which is markedly different from the US Army's application. 

Highways England also state that damage by cars is irrelevant compared to damage by lorries. 

Adey

monquixote said:

digitalscream said:

Sporky said:

digitalscream said:

That would suggest something else is going on here, and it ain't lorries. Quality of materials and workmanship? Very likely. However, that's also going to affect how susceptible it is to vehicles of lower weight.

Therein lies the rub - the tests you referenced are well-known to be problematic, precisely because not all roads are made the same, and Googling around it looks like it's pretty much accepted in the construction industry that the results don't extrapolate well past the very specific road construction used in the tests (which, near as I can tell, was based on a US highway). Yes, the wear is related to the fourth power rule, but it's not negligible for a car on every kind of road. Especially with the penny-pinching, built-down-to-the-lowest-cost approach taken in the UK for the last 15 years.

I think a very significant part of road damage is weather related. Especially freezing. 

It's not so much freezing. It's rain and puddles that causes the problem.

When a vehicle runs over a puddle it is forcing water into any tiny crack like a hydraulic jet. This erodes the road much quicker than freezing.

We've had very little really cold weather this winter down south, but it has been wet (in case no-one noticed) and the roads are wrecked.