UPS has a good union. It is usually the same driver on the same route and they know what they're doing. I don't know what happened with FedEx and their union but it always seems to be a different driver who is not confident. For residential service anyway. Amazon pits multiple local 3rd party carriers against each other in a race to the bottom in both quality of service and labor quality of life. Really shameful behavior by Bezos IMHO.
As I understand, FedEx Express are FedEx employees and paid properly. FedEx ground is “independent contractors” who are poorly paid.
I do not understand the logic behind devaluing the FedEx brand like that, especially since a FedEx express driver will not pickup a FedEx ground package and vice versa. They expect customers to keep track of this?
It used to be that iPhones made great, tasteful photos by default. That was why people bought them.
If I wanted to spend time processing every snapshot I take with my phone, I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T and get pictures that are much better than anything the phone can do.
> I wouldn't use my phone at all, I'd use my X100T
That’s what I’m actually doing. My Pixel 3 died suddenly in November 2021. Since it was an emergency, I bought a cheap phone with a horrible camera, intending to upgrade it quickly and taking photos with my X100T in the meantime. A year later and I’m still using that setup. The camera is portable enough to take it everywhere, the processing presets are good enough for me, and I have the RAW files available just in case. I’m probably in the minority of people who would do something like this, but I’m pretty happy so far.
I have Sony A7III and basically learned how to take pictures so that jpg files out of the camera looks good. I shoot jpg + RAW but I almost never touch RAW files. And people are really surprised when I'm telling them that (especially photographers). I like taking pictures, not editing them. It's definitely minority of people and I heard from many new photographers I meet that I'm wasting my camera abilities. Almost as if I'm not editing pictured from camera then I'm not "real" photographer. Thankfully I don't care anymore about it and I'm happy with my pictures (and my family, friends and other photographers that got used to me :P).
> It used to be that iPhones made great, tasteful photos by default. That was why people bought them.
I think most people buy iPhones because it's a status symbol or because it's what they are accustomed to. Certainly not because of feature A or B, and most definitely not if that feature is "tasteful photos", whatever that means (whose taste?).
But there is a small vocal minority which cares about picture quality, that is true. Totally irrelevant to apple's bottom line though.
It blends multiple shots for better dynamic range, but doesn’t do any heavy processing. If you want a pure single exposure RAW file you can get that using third party apps such as Halide.
Mostly because it's nice to have an uninhabited area downrange of the pad.
The benefit of launching from altitude would not be the potential energy, but the lower air pressure and density. The first would enable rocket engines to operate at higher expansion ratio, and the second would reduce aerodynamic forces. The benefit is apparently not large enough to justify the difficulty of operating on a mountain.
The goal of the rocket is to get the payload high enough to be in space AND fast enough to be in orbit. It's the later that takes most of the fuel, IIUC.
I can imagine two different answers to that and depending on which one you tend to think more there are two different answers to your question.
If you are thinking: space is high up therefore the higher we start the easier we will get there.
The problem with this is that getting into outer space is not that hard, staying there is the hard bit. The international space station orbits about 408km away from the surface of the earth. That is not a long distance. If you would have a car which can travel the same speed a car can usually travel but straight up you could reach that altitude in about 4 hour easy driving.
What is important is what would happen after you reach that elevation and turn off the engine of your car. If you have seen astronauts serenly drifting in space, you might expect that your imaginary car would do the same. But that is not what would happen. You would see that your car starts falling and rapidly!
In fact there is a word for such a flight path. It is called a suborbital space flight. Space flight because it went to space, but “sub” orbital because it lacked something to stay in orbit.
What is that something it lacked? Why do the astronauts float gracefully while your car plumets? The trick is that the astronauts plumet too! They are constantly falling back towards earth, they just go so fast sideways that the earth rolls out from under them. In fact that is what an orbit is. You are falling around the earth with a very high sideways speed.
In essence staying in space equals being in orbit which further equals going very fast.
So now you can see that being high is not the hard bit of staying in space. Flying as fast as a bullet is the hard bit, and of course starting from high won’t help with that.
But! You might think a different thing why launching from a high elevation might help. Maybe you already know that staying in space == going fast. So you are thinking: what hinders us from going fast? The drag of our atmosphere! If we would launch from high there would be less atmosphere around us, thus there would be less drag, thus we wouldn’t waste so much energy to fight it. And you would be right! If you could launch from a high elevation you could spare some energy because there the atmosphere is thinner. But when you run the numbers you see that this is a very small percentage of your total energy expenditure. Mostly because our rockets fly through the dense part of our atmosphere relatively quickly wasting only a little energy to fight drag. Launching from a high elevation would come with it’s own set of challenges of course and wouldn’t help that much relatively.
So depending on which thing you were thinking about you have an answer. Hope it explained the problem better. If you have any more questions about any of the details let me know and I will try my best to explain.
Also sorry for answering this long a seemingly simple question. Would love to answer shorter, but you know it is “rocket science”. ;)
> If you could launch from a high elevation you could spare some energy because there the atmosphere is thinner.
Reminds me of Eve on Kerbal Space Program. Gravity so high and atmosphere so thick that I had to use a helicopter contraption to lift the spacecraft to the highest possible altitude in order to get the rocket to even make it to space to say nothing of the absurd delta-V needed to actually inject into orbit.
My guys were stuck on that planet for a long time...
My thought was that the first mile up would be the hardest to get through because of being closest to the Earth's center. And isn't it something like 1% of the distance that they need to reach for "cheap" horizontal acceleration?
Water usage is heavily region dependent - grass fed beef from a region which does not depend on well irrigation essentially has net zero water usage. The cows eat grass and drink water, which they then piss out watering the grass. This is for sure a problem in an arid region dependent on aquifers to raise livestock, but for instance the midwest has plentiful rain (sometimes far too much in fact) and "water usage" isn't a meaningful limitation. Often times the water usage numbers quoted include all the rain that fell to grow the silage that the cows eat, which still ends up in the same aquifers and rivers eventually whether it passes through a cow or not. There are concerns if there is a poorly managed high point source concentration of manure which causes nutrient runoff into waterways, but that's a far different conversation.
Methane is a better example, but ironically factory farming has the answer there. Collecting manure in a waste pool and turning it into biogas turns it from a negative to a net positive.
"We find irrigation of cattle-feed crops to be the greatest consumer of river water in the western United States, implicating beef and dairy consumption as the leading driver of water shortages and fish imperilment in the region. We assess opportunities for alleviating water scarcity by reducing cattle-feed production, finding that temporary, rotational fallowing of irrigated feed crops can markedly reduce water shortage risks and improve ecological sustainability. Long-term water security and river ecosystem health will ultimately require Americans to consume less beef that depends on irrigated feed crops."
