• 1 Post
  • 166 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 9th, 2023

help-circle





  • 01000001 00100000 01110011 01110100 01100101 01100001 01100100 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01100111 01101110 01100101 01110100 01101001 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101110 01100101 01100101 01100100 01101100 01100101 00101110



  • To be fair, it would slightly reduce the xhance of the user really messing it up. If they remove the screen too we might finally have a user-proof computer. No more “I’ve forgotten my password”, no more “I put the internet in the trash can and now I can’t find it”, and no more “I didn’t do anything (they absolutely did) and now it doesn’t work, this must be your fault. (As the local ‘techie’ it’s not my fault, but it probably is my problem). Fix it!! (sigh…)”


  • I’m unlikely to do a full code audit, unless something about it doesn’t pass the ‘sniff test’. I will often go over the main code flows, the issue tracker, mailing lists and comments, positive or negative, from users on other forums.

    I mean, if you’re not doing that, what are you doing, just installing it and using it??!? Where’s the fun in that? (I mean this at least semi seriously, you learn a lot about the software you’re running if you put in some effort to learn about it)











  • I’m only going to do this very roughly, only for the transport and using US prices (as they’re easier to find), because the total cost of mining, transporting and dumping that much material is astronomical compared to the $70m budget. Even the transport cost alone are an order of magnitude higher.

    Soil has a density of between 1,200 and 1,700 kilograms or 2,645 and 3,747 pounds per cubic metre.

    I couldn’t easily find bulk rates for trunking soil, but bulk trucking rates for grain seem to be in the right area from what I can see. A truckload of up to 80,000lb costs somewhat over $6 per mile.

    Given the weight limit per truck, and taking a middling estimate of soil density of 3000lb/m^3 (rock would be heavier and so increase the cost), we can transport around 80000/3000=26m^3 per truck, at a cost of at least 615=$90, or $3.46 per m^3. Our budget for the whole operation was 75,000,000/(3,500,000100)=$0.20 per m^3.

    From those figures we can see that simply trucking the spoil fron the operation would be more than 15 times the cost of paying the landowners. That ignores all of the other costs. Local rates may be sonewhat cheaper, but probably not enough to make a serious difference, and you’d need to ship over 10 million truckloads of dirt, which would put massive strain on local infrastructure too.


  • If I read your measurements correctly, you’re talking about digging up over 350 million cubic metres of soil and rock, transporting them 15km and dumping them safely. Comparing that to the cost of paying the land owners gives you a budget of approximately $0.20 per cubic metre. Ignoring the digging costs, you’d have to check what your local rates for trucking bulk soil would be over that distance, but I suspect they’re more than that on their own.

    Then you have the rather signicicant issue of what to do with the literal mountain of soil and rock you need to dispose of. Just dumping it is going to cause pretty serious changes to the local environment, not least of which would be a new mountain.