Well sure, but it's 'Not Here'. So power lines are needed. And space for the Grid Solar is needed. But that's the trade for the lower price isn't it?

Oddly it appears now to be doing wonders for AVIS, HERTZ and friends as they get $500 and up for a rental car (when you can even find one) when that same car was down to $100 or less when Uber and Lyft were clobbering their business model. So now they have far fewer cars and fewer staff, and thus much less cost. Meanwhiletheir income is vastly higher on those lower costs. May be time to 'stock up' on Rental car companies??

We are currently served by 4G or Fixed wireless, mostly around 3 to 5Mbps. Fortunately our electric utility is a coop and is actually building out fiber to the home. They have completed several areas and ours was next to be installed, THIS YEAR! True Gb speeds for $100 a month is AWESOME and I've been signed up for a couple years already.

This makes sense given they can't make a profit on it and they already have poles and rights of way all the way to every home. Should be straight up simple.

BUT NO! Turns out the government decided that the permits expected to take a year to clear will now take three years. Not to worry though my US rep says "It's not a delay, it's a continuance." Sorry bub, if it walks like a delay, talks like a delay, it's a delay. You see here in rural Michigan it's darn likely lines will cross both State and National forest lands. And despite there being poles running through them with power already hanging, our utility needs to spend three years getting permits to ADD fiber to those existing poles. My brother suggested: "You know in case the fiber gets cut and the laser beam starts the forest on fire. Isn't that what started the 'Camp Fire' in California???"

So yeah that's cool that Comcast has a POC to bring 10Gb to someone's home, but it will never happen here.

Customer has computers and phones and switches in the same room as the well pump and major plumbing and HVAC. The room is sunk approx 4 or 5 ft down from the main floor. Server is big old COMPAQ deskside unit sitting on a table. Something starts building on fire and away she goes. Fire department gets it out and a couple hours later I arrive to a horrified staff. The phone system was a black melted plastic goo blob on the wall as were the network switches. All the backups for the server are on the table next to the server and all of them got hot enough to melt. The server's CD and tape drive, at the top, also were melted badly but the old girl fired up once we cleaned a few things and disconnected the tape and CD Drive. The top drive in the RAID set was also dead but the lower ones escaped the heat and survived. We connected the server to a replacement and copied 100% of the data from old to new with no loss. The building and all its contents were a total loss including a couple brand new laptops just delivered and still in the box.

Actually in Northern Michigan they are exploring several mines for pumped hydro storage Most of the mines up there are tapped out and they virtually all have water at the bottom and lakes or area that could be lakes at the surface. Much of the problem there is just how far it is they will need to run power lines to be able to leverage the facilities efficiently. Big cities in the U.P. simply don't exist and for that matter neither do vast solar farms :-)

Certainly if you have significant height difference as well as lots of water then investigating pumped hydro storage should be on the list.

You are correct that containers only appear to stack neatly on their own but require manually installed twist lock connectors to stack, well as least as I'm aware they are still manually installed. This is why I wouldn't think stacking them would be desired. Best is to keep them all on a level surface both on the surface and in the mine. The process of grasping and releasing them from the top though is well automated and reliable.

I am aware of the huge CO2 impact of making concrete. Yes it seems like the blocks used by the tower could be lower quality less dense concrete and while I'm no engineer it seems that if you stack them high enough the ones at the bottom will need to support all those stacked above and that won't be trivial. In my theoretical container there is only a prestressed concrete piece laid in the bottom of the container to support the rocks and sand that fill the remainder.

You say I'm trying to make it more complicated than the stacking tower but that thing has a lot of moving parts and needs to do everything right or the entire stack could be in danger. Automated elevators ('lifts' technically) have been around forever. I worked on construction of one myself more than 40 years ago. I built the controls for the thing and back then they were relays, limit switches, motor controllers, big fuses, a couple switches and indictor lights, one big red Emergency Stop button and a few PLCs. Today my golf watch probably has sufficient computational power to run the entire system.

Additionally where do all those stackable blocks come from? I'm not talking about manufacture but where are they when they aren't in the stack? Seems they'd need to be within reach of the tower, which limits the number available to the surface area under its reach. If they have to be brought in from outside that reach, then that adds complication to that solution as well. Further, the lower levels of those blocks store a fraction of the energy of those nearer the top. Your suggestion to put the thing on top of a cliff would greatly improve the efficiency given the height of the cliff multiplies the amount of potential energy storage.

Finally I'm not stuck with a requirement to use actual shipping containers. If their value has gone way up then come up with something else. At one point I knew of thousands of them stacked in yards and nobody wanted them. It was too expensive to ship them back to Asia to refill them, but that's some time ago. Using the lift method the shape of the containers is perfect because there is little space between them when stored either on the top or bottom of the lift. Other dense rectangles with lift attachment points would also function admirably.

I've seen the rail idea and that makes a lot of sense in locations where you can find a long enough slope at an appropriate angle. Boxes full of rocks, sand, etc going up and down a slope on the frame of a locomotive with the prime mover and cab removed certainly will perform this function.

For the 'legos' what I'm thinking of is used shipping containers. There are millions of them, they are designed for top lift. Reliable mechanisms for grasping the top and releasing them are readily available. Since most mines have large horizonal shafts at the bottom of the vertical shaft all you need down there is rails where wheels added to the bottom of the containers land. At slow speed on level ground with steel wheel on steel rail an electric powered tug or other mechanism can move many tons easily. They don't need to move quickly just in time to be ready for the next trip of the crane Similarly, topside, the containers can be lined up on a similar rail or rails and moved to the top of the mine where they are picked and lowered to generate power or lifted topside to store power. Likely the thing could have more than one box in transport in parallel as well.

Agreed though that it really makes sense only when there is already a viable open mine and the deeper it goes the better.

I'm not at all convinced that such a mechanism is more complicated than a crane that has to move in multiple directions remain balanced side to side, and work out in the weather including wind. A significantly simpler lift and lower mechanism that doesn't have to deal with weather and is firmly planted on the ground has to cost a lot less.

The crane bit seems relatively complicated. It seems to me if you used standard shaped things that were intended to be top lifted and automatic latching an unlatching gear was already well matured that would solve a lot of problems. Then if you lowered them down into unused mines you get a much safer setup as you don't need to build a tower or deal with wind. Further if at the bottom of said mine there were long horizontal shafts where these things could be moved sideways on rails after being lowered that means every weight stores and releases the same amount of energy as the height is consistent. These containers are already readily available and in some places worth nothing but their scrap value and there are millions of them. They are the ubiquitous intermodal shipping container. No this idea doesn't work if there are no mines but then pumped hydro doesn't work in many places either.

When the architecture of your system took a long term view such as IBM did with the S/38 then AS/400 and now Power Systems with the IBM i operating system, then you're in good shape!

Literally programs that were compiled onto the S/38 can be restored at the object level and will run or as source code and can be recompiled and will run. Clearly this doesn't mean the code is modern or applicable to the task any longer but if it IS and it still does what's needed for the task then that is value right there and it helps explain why, 32 years after the introduction of the AS/400 billions of lines of RPG and COBOL still run today on Power Systems and IBM i keeping so many vital businesses operational!

I am currently president of COMMON the worlds largest IBM Power Systems users group (*now known as an association). We are celebrating 60 years this year and continue to provide in person and on-line education and training. We certainly support that one of the highest values of user groups is the ability for users to learn from each other through discussion, demonstration, and experimentation.

That said it is absolutely more difficult to draw users together when competing with all the on-line content available today. Unfortunately as we all know it can be excruciatingly frustrating to find answers using 'the google' and its ilk. How many times have you read much of a thread only to find: "I fixed it" but not a peep about HOW that was accomplished!

Larry Bolhuis
President
COMMON
www.common.org

Here's one. The Oliver Machinery company was sued by a guy who cut off a finger using a 30+ year old saw after removed a guard from it. The saw was on it's third owner by that time and at the time of that purchase still had the original blade guards in place. He claimed "The 30 year old design was dangerous." among other ridiculous things. And he won. https://books.google.com/books...

All this figuring out who people are based on what they drive cracks me up. Despite being 6'5" my daily driver is a Prius. However my hauler is a HD 2500 Quad Cab Long Box 4x4 Hemi RAM. And with that I tow the ass end of a 1972 Ford F100 Pickup that is now a trailer. Great at hauling all manner of stuff.

Let them try to figure ME out LOL!

And you're right that I don't give 2 shits, likely not even 1!

As far as I understand lithium batteries of any form size weight shape color brand or age are banned in checked bags period, at least in the USA. If you are ever waiting to board and they are begging for folks to check their bags they continuously repeat how all batteries must be removed and taken with you into the cabin. As a consequence I am puzzled why this is even an issue, again at least in the US.

When I was a teenager we built perhaps 50 different versions of tennis ball cannons using various cans and pipes. We fueled them with white gas or zippo lighter fluid or final net hair spray. These were very analogous to potato guns. The difference is a misplaced tennis ball shot into the air (and yeah we did that plenty) simply bounced because terminal velocity of a tennis ball doesn't even hurt much let alone harm anyone. Initially we were simply shooting straight up for fun and at night lighting the balls on fire. Later though we built many versions that we shoulder launched with gas grill like sparkers for the trigger. Remarkably accurate and powerful actually. I may have to find my favorite drone operator and go have a shoot down contest! My wife won't miss those tired tennis balls....

The largest producer in the world of lead for batteries is in fact a plant that recycles lead acid batteries! Lead is VERY recyclable. You may be surprised to find out that the acid from those batteries ends up as a key ingredient of laundry detergent!

Of the 5 Prii that I have owned the average 'first brake job' is well pas t150,000. Contrast that to the Dodge vehicles we drove before that where attaining 40,000 on a set of brakes was extraordinary! Our Toyota dealer echoes this explaining that the average Prius goes 'about double' the miles of a Corolla before needing brakes.