I've noticed that there seems to be big inconsistencies from location to location, at least around me. One Best Buy never has anything on the shelves, doesn't have much of their higher-end stuff at all, and constantly looks like they just got robbed.
But 15 minutes away there's another Best Buy that has a dedicated PC hardware section that almost reminds me of going to Fry's back in the day. I was flabbergasted the first time I walked in there, I almost thought I'd been mistaken and entered a different store.
Are you in the bay area, by chance? I suspect the opening of MicroCenter will mean almost no one around here even thinks to try BestBuy for component hardware.
That said, I purchased some peripherals at BB a few months ago because they had what I needed in stock and the price was better than Logitech and the same as Amazon.
Yes, early cars had to be started with a crank handle that stuck out of the front of the grill, similar to how early propeller engines had to be hand-spun to get going. Apparently if you didn't crank it quite hard enough the handle could snap back at you rather violently, one of my great-grandmothers had her arm broken this way.
> the handle could snap back at you rather violently
If it backfired. I got thrown over a Studebaker that way when I was like 8; I wasn't big enough to turn the handle by hand so I was jumping on it. It usually worked tho.
With the piston engines they had to be turned over by hand first to let the oil drain out of the cylinders before starting them by pulling on the propeller.
There's also the fact that there's only about six inches of dirt here, dig any deeper than that and you hit solid limestone. That's why none of the houses here have basements.
It also has a disadvantage in that it's extremely porous and allows water to seep through it, which expands and contracts with temperature changes and causes the limestone to crack. There's areas around town where roads have been cut through hills, and if you drive through these after a big rainfall you can literally see water pouring out the side of the rock face. Chunks of limestone breaking off and falling onto the side of the road is a pretty regular occurrence.
There's other issues, too, such as the lake that runs through the middle of the city, the underground rivers and cave networks in the area, and the unstable clay on the East side of town that expands and contracts with rain, causing all sorts of problems.
Do you actually have any sources or are you just making assumptions based on how you see limestone behave on the surface?
I don’t have sources myself but to me the porous nature of limestone seems like a benefit since water would easily flow to the water table instead of flooding in the tunnel.
Erosion seems like it would be a far bigger problem for tunnels in soil or sand than it would be for limestone.
Water generally flows down. If you have a high water table building basements is usually foolish.
Limestone, because it dissolves in contact with acidic water (and rainwater is slightly acidic) is also prone to sinkholes. Best to keep the ground stable by not exposing it to more water. It happens so often in Florida there’s an FAQ page. https://floridadep.gov/fgs/sinkholes
there is no one reason why we dont have basements, but it is more likely to do with the fact that up north they have to dig deep (3-4 ft) for the frost line. If you are digging that deep anyway, you might as well go an additional 4-5 ft and build a basement.
Excavating limestone isnt that hard. Instead of one day to dig a basement in soil, it would take about 14 days to dig a typical basement in limestone (based on digging pools in limestone). It costs about 1500/day for the crew/equipment so an extra 21K for the excavation.
East austin has no limestone and basements are still rare.
> there is no one reason why we dont have basements, but it is more likely to do with the fact that up north they have to dig deep (3-4 ft) for the frost line. If you are digging that deep anyway, you might as well go an additional 4-5 ft and build a basement.
In Minnesota, where I live, basements are definitely a byproduct of structural requirements. You have to dig 48 inches so that your foundation is under the frost line. But also consider that you don't want your front door to be at ground level, because then it might not open after a massive snowfall. So if you add up all that vertical space, you get about 7 feet, which is about the ceiling height of an unfinished basement.
It might not be 'that hard' to excavate limestone, but an additional 21,000 dollars added to the cost along with 14x longer work time is not an insignificant difference.
East Austin doesn't have them because of the unstable clay that expands and contracts with rains, same reason the track surface at COTA has had so many issues. The ground doesn't stay put.
Couple those things with the frost line issue you mentioned, along with the likelihood of flooding, and it probably comes down to the fact that it's just too much work to be worth it.
Depends. Some combine the fence posts with concrete (adding weight), some add reinforcing metal posts, some do nothing. Watching fences collapse after a strong wind storm is a common sight.
Its worth noting you can generally still drill a hole into caliche.
Alternatively its roughly 3 days of work to drill, blast & dig out a basement excavation, but explosives are scary so such work is often blocked outright.
That may be true in some areas of Austin, but in most cases, it's about cost and expectations. Austin straddles the border between dry, rocky west Texas and wetter, black soil east Texas, but houses have traditionally been built without basements no matter what kind of soil they were built on, in Austin and in other parts of Texas. These days, a lot of newer, more expensive houses are built with basements to maximize usable square footage.
Houses used to be small, built of wood, and hardly attached to the ground at all. It was fairly common practice to pick up a house and move it to another plot nearby.
I think once cities get older and more ossified in their shape is when basements start to appear.
Assuming there is no other reason to avoid it like flooding, hard rock, earthquakes, etc.
That would make sense, IIRC our brains use something around 20% of our caloric intake just at “idle” so it’d make sense to me that they consume more energy when we push them harder.
That’s interesting, I would’ve been concerned about what happens to the tires when a plane taking off/landing hits those tracks, but I guess it isn’t an issue.
They look small since they're next to big planes, but plane tires are actually quite big, so I'm not surprised they wouldn't have any trouble w/ the tracks.
I was more thinking about smaller GA planes, but it’s probably a similar situation. They’re designed to slam into the ground with a plane on top of them over and over again, so they’re probably more than strong enough.
There’s a significant difference in the amount of force on a car tire vs the amount of force on a plane tire while it’s landing. But it’s undoubtedly designed for.
You'd honestly probably have a better time, unless there was something you specifically wanted to see at SXSW. So many people come into town for it that getting anywhere in the city becomes a nightmare.
Taking this thread way off the original topic now, but yeah. Would love to visit for the music scene—SWSX probably would crowd out what I actually want to get out of the place when I think about it longer than 30 seconds.
For the modern SXSW experience, just go to the local supermarket when it's ultra busy and the parking lot is full. Park your car among the rest and just sit in it.
I'm not sure this one is overshadowed, maybe by dentists. But Orthodontists are doctors (DDS or DMD) and those are generally pretty well paying types of careers.
But 15 minutes away there's another Best Buy that has a dedicated PC hardware section that almost reminds me of going to Fry's back in the day. I was flabbergasted the first time I walked in there, I almost thought I'd been mistaken and entered a different store.