kerryfalk

It was put best to me: Don't tell the dog it's not a chicken, we need the eggs.

It's explicitly stated within their sales page and directly contradictory to the statement he made above.

My early family life resembled the parent's. The difference in my case and related to your point wasn't the absence of distractions it was to get at them I had to learn how to make the damn computer work. I once tricked my 286 into thinking it was a 386 so that I could install Windows 3.1. All for the purpose of... playing solitaire. Yeah, that's how bored I was.

I'm not even sure I could replicate doing that today. As a 9 year old I was better with a rudimentary BIOS than I am today with a modern one. I'm pretty sure it was because there was a barrier between me and what I wanted and the only way to get it was to figure out that horrendous system.

Woah. This thread just hit me in a - ridiculously - profound way.

The day the Internet died.

This system seems to indicate that the automated trucks do the long hauls between cities and the human drivers do the shorter hauls within/around cities.

If that's the case, this is a good thing.

Fun fact: the manufacturing industry has been able to obtain machine utilization at nearly 100%. Mining is in the 40% range.

A significant part of the world’s GDP is in mining and mining and its subsidiary industries (manufacturing for example could not exist without mining) contributes something like 60-70% of the world’s GDP.

We do not have vast excess supply. There are likely many deposits left to be found but it’s widely accepted that the easy resources have been found and we must go deeper to find more. Exploration over the last couple of years has not been invested in and the trove of known resources has been dwindling.

Mining space is impractical due to costs (there are a lot of cost savings to still be had on Earth).

Source: I work for one of the world’s largest suppliers of mining equipment and am heavily involved in the mining market in Canada and peripherally the rest of the world for hard rock mining.

I responded rather abruptly and forcefully so that everyone within earshot could hear: "She's quite good at what she does."

I must be missing something here. Once something reaches the mass of a black hole, it becomes a black hole. No? How is it possible for a mass to be greater than a black hole but not a black hole? Mass over distance?