Home elevators are a thing. We had one in our previous house, as did many other homes in the neighborhood. They are not terribly expensive, about $12k/floor during construction.
Not the US, but my dad just got one installed in his two story home, cost him around US$25k for installation of the lift/elevator itself, although he incurred a few grand more on modifications to create a space to install it in (would have been more but he did some of them himself). Not a new house, around 40-50 years old. In part, he got the idea because one of his neighbours had already done it. Plus his partner has dementia and climbing stairs has been becoming an ever increasing challenge for her.
We saw a new house with an elevator when we were looking, but it seemed to be an accessibility quota thing, I don’t want to think what it costs to maintain and what kind of inspections it needs.
Generally home eaevators are made of things that don't need inspections. Screws will last for decades without issues and when they fail rescue workers can get you out. Those systems are too slow and expensive for use commercial buildings but good enough for a short house. Thus commercial buildings will use a cable which is cheaper and faster but they stretch and break over time so you must do safety inspection. (a house sized screw is under a grand so not really a big factor in price, but that much cable will get several floors.
some commercial builings use hydraulic elevators which when they break just slowly lower you to the bottom floor . Again much less inspections needed because they are desirned safe. but the slow speed and cost mean only a few floors are possible
Cable systems are not cheap. The biggest issue with cables is the cores dry out. Hydraulic doesn't have to be slow by any means and they dont just seep down unless you blow a seal on the cylinder. Even then it would take an hour under a full load to move a story. Thats a lot of hydraulic fluid to displace. Hydraulic elevators are also prone to issues with cold temperature as the oil can become quite viscous when not in regular use.
I was thinking a hose break not a seal which would fall much faster. Which is why you would design them slow - if a hose breaks they are still a safe fall. (of course if you make them fast then you need more inspection, a trade off)
That said I'm not an elevator expert. The details I've given so far is about all I know. So if/when someone claims to be an expert and contradicts me - well they could be right.
Maintenance was essentially zero. No regular official inspections needed, but we had an elevator company come out every 3-4 years for a general inspection. Ours was a 3 story hydraulic unit.
This is very accurate. Most of the time the motivation behind restrictions and not releasing code is rooted in support costs. People can and will break things inadvertently, but they won't like that and will then go the route of requesting support, RMAs, etc. Additionally in some cases those people that developed random customizations will release them, and now other users will install or use them, and if an issue crops up, the support costs are now exponentially worse.
Is there any evidence that this actually happens? The percentage of customers who install custom firmware would be low to begin with, much less the percentage of those who then have problems with it and try to get the company to support it instead of the community that developed it. The idea that this type of support request is going to dominate support costs seems pretty farfetched.
Package insurance is more of the exception than the norm, even for stuff like that. The insurance cost is proportionate to the value you claim, and it's not cheap (not like 10%, but still, for $400K, might be $1,000?). That cuts into margins, especially when you consider that you are expecting a global freight company to be able to globally deliver a basic freight item.
FWIW, I've had really good interactions with FedEx for the most part.
Including for Apple hardware, where I had a FedEx driver pull into the end of my long driveway, wait 5 seconds and then leave. They marked the signature-required MacBook Air as "undeliverable, nobody home", while I was in fact home and waiting for the delivery. Called the local FedEx hub and they sent the driver back to me.
Odds are those connections weren't sanctioned by the building management and were the result of lax enforcement. There are actually plenty of smaller apartment buildings in the US where tenants could get away with this as long as they didn't damage the building or cause frustration for other tenants.
I noticed that too. It also doesn't seem to always know how to map (or remove) certain things, like the hair bun on the input image, to the generated avatars once you get outside of the facial region.
Dropbox was where I first encountered the infantilization of the workplace, with animated emojis all over your biannual performance review. It was a shock, having come from a real company run by adults. Now everyone thinks this is normal, at least at companies that use Slack where 40% of the traffic is animated emojis.
Exactly how I felt working at Google with their “open concepts”. Thankfully I am back at the University of Washington in a cubicle now, away from the yuppy babies. God knows where people get these ridiculous ideas.
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