480/277V with be a triplet of pole mount transformers, or one pad mount transformer (likewise for 208/120V). Many of the USPS motorpools in rural and semi-rural areas may not even have 3-phase distribution lines to their site. To make the math easy, let's change that 50 chargers to 51, so 17 chargers per phase. If chargers are 20A/208V, that means typical full load is probably 16A. That's 272A per phase if all are running full load, but let's call it 80% for a more typical average, so about 218A/phase and about 78KVA in total. That's not an insubstantial load as far infrastructure and contracting costs go. Combine recent construction cost inflation and government contracting, you're probably easily talking a $100K project.

Now, I'm not opposed to BEV, and it can be a good fit for the application, but I can see why USPS didn't go for an full BEV fleet. Now, why weren't all or nearly all the non-BEVs spec'd to be hybrids? That is the question that baffles me. Lots of slow speed stop and go with a little bit of smooth driving to get there and back. Pretty much the ideal situation for a hybrid.

My roommate works at one of the newer warehouses. He got in as an opening hire doing warehousing sort of tasks, and is now a training coordinator. His only complaints about working conditions have had to do with lazy coworkers and the ergonomics of the barcode scanner (relative to the height of the packages on the conveyer belt). "It's not that hard," as he puts it. The rates expected do seem to be slightly high, but not absurdly so. I'd say it's a really good job for someone with youthful stamina (I'm about a decade older than my roommate), but would be a bit uncomfortable if you're used to sitting at a desk all day.

I would be great to get a port of Pitfall! II, but that might be a bit of a task as the cartridge had an extra processor (of sorts) on the cartridge that layered audio together (since the Atari 2600 was only capable of playing one audio "track" at a time), so that game had simultaneous music and sound effects. I have a copy of the cartridge I got at a garage sale when I was maybe 10 years old, but the cartridge failed around the time I turned 20 (bummer!). It's a pretty hard to find game because it was released right at the start of the video game crash and Activision promptly put a stop order on production.

The temperature extremes are part of shock testing the material and helps to simulate a service-life's worth of heating and cooling cycles. It also works as a safety factor against temperatures that are actually expected to be encountered.

Look up "tractor rake" sometime. Depending on the type, you can get ones for soil smoothing, brush removal, or even root removal. Also useful to setup fire lines to contain wild fires or control burns.

I'm in a similar boat to the parent, except my driver for dumping their cable package was when they started enforcing internet data caps and wanted me to pay more for unlimited data. I did, sort of, but dropped the expensive cable package I was barely using to make up the difference in cost, and then some.

Maybe for newly manufactured ones. My several year old Panasonic Viera (plasma display) is 600 Hz capable.

My roommate tried Blue Apron out: these guys had horrible quality control. The way the delivery box was packed and insulated was significantly different every single time. The one common thing seemed to be that the food packets that needed to be kept cold (and sealed) were inevitably on the bottom of the box with the heavier items stacked on top, so the food packets on the bottom often ruptured. We had more than one occasion where the box was soggy because the ice blocks ripped through the plastic bags then melted everywhere.

The final straw was a box where a both meat packet ruptured and the ice bag ruptured. We couldn't tell at the time, due to all the ice melt, but the meat drippings had also soaked into the box. I brought the box into the house, my roommate unpacked it when he got home later in the evening, then the box sat in the corner of the kitchen for a couple days. When I went to take the box out to the recycling bin, I lifted it up, and there was a sickening maggot infestation in the bottom of the box! I killed the maggots, but I made my roommate clean up the mess to make sure he would believe me. Needless to say, he cancelled his subscription immediately thereafter.

The joke is on you. Cast iron has more carbon than steel, with at least 2% carbon content.

Qatar is WORSE than a desert. It has the sandy barrens of a desert, plus it's a peninsula that sticks out in the middle of the Gulf, so you get horribly high humidity, too. I've been a lot of places in the summer that are terrible as far as heat and/or humidity goes (Arizona, the American South, Korea, Afghanistan, Oman, Kuwait) but Qatar was by far the most miserable. The thermometers read 140F (60C) in the shade, and the humidity was freakin' condensing in places you wouldn't really expect it to! (Yes, I know the "world record" is 137F or something like that, but weather station standards have to be met to vie for a record, meaning having vegetation, not sand or pavement, below the thermometer, but there isn't much vegetation in Qatar)

Looks like Microsoft decided to renew the rivalry with X-plane www.x-plane.com. X-Plane has always had a fairly small team, but was first with world-wide scenery, and is still pretty good with 60 GB of scenery (local hard drive), but uses a fair amount of autogenerated scenery for structures outside core areas. Microsoft has always had an edge with modelling major metropolitan areas, having a much larger development team (which really helps with artwork), but I have to admit, this new streaming scenery looks really good! I'm sure there will be heated discussions amongst flight sim fans about which has the better physics, weather, ATC, spaceflight, other planets, mod capabilities, etc.

Just a reminder that paper/pulp mills get the majority of their non-recycled raw material from the byproduct of lumber mills (saw dust, etc.) and sometimes post-logging chipping operations (for the parts of felled trees that don't make good lumber: branches and such).

That and the Hubble Constant was always just an empirical ones, not one rooted in any particular physics. Hubble took a bunch of measurements of estimated distances to distant galaxies and plotted those numbers vs. their doppler shifts and noticed there appeared to be a strong,1st-order linear correlation. So, the Hubble Constant is just the slope of the regression line on the data.

Now others have used Hubble's data (and subsequent revisions) as a basis for astrophysical models of the expansion of the universe, but there is always a "caveat emptor" about extrapolating empirical models passed the domain & range of the original data set: new data outside the domain of the old may diverge outside that linear relation. Having the correlation diverge from a 1st order linear correlation might actually simplify the models a bit.

This town does not appear like there would be any range issues for patrols, nor too many great opportunities for long-distance police chases:

Checking the map, the town appears to be about 3 miles x 6 miles (about 4.8 km x 9.6 km), but sort of F-shaped so less than 18 square miles. Around half of the area within the city limits appears to be large, rural fields (like crop lands or pastures). It has a couple of country highways (1-lane each direction, no divider) running through it, with only about 1/2 mile of an interstate (divided multi-lane) cutting through the northwest corner. The interstate is probably handled by the state police, rather than the local PD.

In related news, 49% of all respondents have never suffered food poisoning.