TerraLiner:12 m Globally Mobile Beach House/Class-A Crossover w 6x6 Hybrid Drivetrain

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Of course "individual diffuser" oxygen outlets are also found in the sleeper cars of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway.

But images found on the web suggest that China Railways has not yet decided whether these should be labelled green:





Or red:







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6. More oxygen for the rich, less for the poor


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There's just one caveat. As the useful link above warns:

"...there are 4 oxygen supply ports near every berth in each cabin of soft-sleeper car [i.e. the "premium" or first-class sleepers].

But there are fewer oxygen outlets in hard-sleeper cars [second-class], usually one port for one car..."

Again, see http://www.tibetdiscovery.com/train-to-tibet/tibet-train-oxygen-supply .

So if you and your sleeper-car companions on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway have money:





And if you don't:





The Chinese clearly abandoned Maoist communist egalitarianism decades ago, given that they're designing social hierarchy into the very structure of their Tibetan railway passenger cars. Passengers who pay less, get less oxygen.....:yikes:

Indeed, China's GINI coefficient is now even worse than the United States, which is really saying something (the United States has a very bad GINI coefficient):





The GINI coefficient is the most common measure of economic inequality, used by Economists worldwide -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient , http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Gini_coefficient.html , http://www.theatlantic.com/internat...anks-near-bottom-on-income-inequality/245315/ , http://www.darkpolitricks.com/2011/01/inequality-in-america-is-worse-than-in-egypt-tunisia-or-yemen/ , and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...ncome-inequality-the-u-s-ranks-below-nigeria/ . And in a field of 142 countries China now ranks 115, while the United States ranks 101-- seehttps://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html .

Note that in this CIA GINI ranking it is important to reverse the order, because it's backwards. Sweden, a very egalitarian society, has the world's best GINI coefficient, and should rank number 1. And yet the CIA table lists Sweden as number 142. Most European countries rank in the top 40, and if the EU were a single unified country, its average GINI coefficient would rank it number 23, again with the CIA rank-order reversed. So given that China now ranks 115, and the United States ranks 101, both of them rank in the bottom third of countries worldwide.

Or put another way, in the map above China and the United States both group with Second- and Third-World countries colored purple, orange, and red. They do not group with the First-World and Second-World countries colored green.

Yes, I know that we're not supposed to get political on ExPo.....

But that that little design detail in the sleeper cars of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway – differential access to oxygen, depending on how much you're willing to pay, or how much you can pay – spoke volumes about the kind of society that China has become. It could not go unremarked. :sombrero:


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7. To pressurize or not to pressurize?


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So dwh: given that Bombadier and the Chinese decided against cabin pressurization on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, would you still recommend it? If so, why do you think it would work better in an expedition camper?

Please note that I am not saying it won't work. It just might! I am merely curious about why you think it might work, and how you would implement it. egn has proposed camper pressurization a number of times in this thread, and it does seem like a good idea:

It is no problem to run Webasto or Ebersbächer diesel heaters at altitudes above 5000 m. You either connect to the diagnostic interface and reduce the fuel amount to the amount of O2 available, by reducing the rate of the fuel pump is ticking. Or you install additional fuel pumps, which deliver less fuel per tick. A friend has 5 fuel pumps installed for altitudes from 0 m up to 5000 m and can switch them on the fly. I also read about someone who has implemented a rate converter that changes the input rate from the heater to a specific rate according the altitude. At least for some of the current versions there are altitude kits available or they measure the O2 content and adapt dynamically to the altitude.

Of course, all the solutions cause power loss of the heater, just like an engine has less power at higher altitude. So you have to size the heater accordingly to compensate the power loss. And it is recommended that you have a second heating system as backup. But water cooled engines can provide this backup without any problems.

For high altitude travel I also thought about to increase pressure in the cabin a little bit. As side effect this can be used to turbocharge the heater to get full power when necessary.

So I was just wondering what the design considerations might be to implement a pressurized camper cabin, that would function well at 15,000 feet....

All best wishes,


Biotect


PS -- egn, if you're reading this and the topic still interests you, same question to you....

 

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Brief Tatra Sidenote


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I don't want to get too distracted from the important question of Tibetan-altitude and camper pressurization.....

But dhw, your post about the Tatra semi-conversion, and my web-searches for the same, turned up an interesting Tatra video that I'd missed before. This video addresses the research and procurement process that led the US Bureau of Land Management to purchase a number of Tatra 815's in 2003, built by ATC (the American Truck Company) – see http://www.trucksplanet.com/catalog/model.php?id=1855 .

I've already posted lots of pics about these vehicles on page 8, post #76, where I then added the new video to the other one I'd already found – see http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...xpedition-RV-w-Rigid-Torsion-Free-Frame/page8 (standard ExPo pagination).

Here are the two videos again:


[video=youtube;v-f4P7mrGIk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-f4P7mrGIk#t=159 [/video]


Once more, this specific Tatra 815 is used to control “wildland fires” in the Great Basin, Nevada – see http://www.angelfire.com/nv/blm/page1.html , http://www.angelfire.com/nv/blm/ATC.html , http://www.thebigredguide.com/fire-...n/sands-fire-apparatus-wildland-ultra-xt.html , and http://www.fireapparatusmagazine.co...t-uses-proven-czech-off-road-engineering.html . Previously they'd used Unimogs to control fires, and it seems they still do, but the Tatra 815 provides additional capability – see http://www.angelfire.com/nv/blm/pics.html , http://www.angelfire.com/nv/blm/engines.html , and http://www.angelfire.com/nv/blm/unimog.html .

The first video has commentary by a Tatra technician, who emphasizes the torsion-free nature of the Tatra backbone-tube frame. The video also states that the truck's automatic transmission had to be incorporated into the backbone-tube. If I'm hearing the video correctly, "Twin Disc" was subcontracted to do this, and has also done the same for Tatra trucks sold to India -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_Disc , http://www.twindisc.com , http://www.twindisc.com/en/industrial/industrial-products/power-shift-transmissions , http://twindisc.qmworks.com/data/en...ds/Automatic_Transmission_System_Brochure.pdf , http://twindisc.qmworks.com/data/en...ontrol/media/downloads/Auto_Transmissions.pdf , http://www.tatratrucks.com/trucks/product-catalog/t-815-7/ , http://www.tatratrucks.com/why-tatra/tatra-vehicle-design/tatra-transmissions/ , and http://www.twindisc.com/search/?zoom_query=tatra .

Here are images from the Twin Disc PDF, which show the relationship between the Twin Disc transmission and the Tatra backbone tube:





All best wishes,


Biotect

 

[dwh]

Don't even get me started on China. I've been telling people for decades that is not and has not been "communist" since 5 minutes after Mao died. As soon as he was gone, the Mandarins were back. (Same thing happened in France 5 minutes after Bonaparte was captured and exiled.) Which is why the American Mandarins sent G.H.W. Bush to negotiate the deal with the Chinese Mandarins to move the majority of the first world manufacturing jobs to China. Hence 40% unemployment across the first world today. (Including the U.S. - even though the politicians and the news media keep telling people it's 8% and most people actually believe that lie.)

Of course, that deal has run its course (right on schedule), and the Mandarin rats are leaving the ship. Why? Is it sinking? Or about to sink? Well yea, personally, I think it's gonna get nuked (j/k - actually it'll most likely be a bio-weapon). Basing the estimate on how much energy the sun supplies, many experts have been saying for decades that the hard limit to population on Earth is between 8 and 10 billion. So what's to be done? Well, obviously, from the (American, European, Russian and Chinese) Mandarin POV, the solution is simple - WWIII and The Big Die Off. (I know, that's all conspiracy theory nonsense. But everyone knows I'm a conspiracy theorist. What most don't know, is that I've also got a genius level IQ (certified by a team from the UCLA Dept. of Psychology when I was 11), so maybe I'm not as crazy as I seem. (Then again...maybe I'm crazier than I seem. ))

So anyway, let's leave off the China politics for now. Once they get done nuking the place, then we can discuss what comes after. (IF we survive, which isn't likely. Pretty sure I'm NOT on the list of "keepers".)





As for pressurization...please, it's not rocket science.

You need, A) air pressure, B) good seals, C) filters and D) valves and a regulator.

https://www.google.com/search?clien....0..0.0....0...1c.1.51.img..2.0.0.bFicc0fncVA

https://www.google.com/search?clien...1.1.0....0...1c.1.51.img..1.1.605.zrTeVU6gAPE


As long as you can get internal pressure around 8,000'-10,000' density altitude, you're in the ballpark. If it were me, I'd probably just try to steal a system from a Cessna P-210 or something similar:

http://www.aopa.org/Pilot-Resources...ine-Aircraft-Technology/AOPA-Career-Pilot-(4)

 

[biotect]

dwh,

Many thanks for the lead regarding the Cessna. Yes, that's the clear precedent; I hadn't thought of that. Agreed, if a small, lightly built turboprop can have cabin pressure in the 8,000 - 10,000 foot range, there seems no reason in principle why it couldn't be done in a properly constructed expedition motorhome.


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1. Camper Pressurization following TurboProp Precedent


The following is a good, potted summary of how cabin pressurization works in turboprops:

All pressurized aircraft are capable of flying above ten thousand feet. The human body, on the other hand, seems to function best when supplied with oxygen that maintains a pressure altitude of 10,000 feet or lower. Once a flight is above that pressure altitude, we must have an aircraft system that will do this for our passengers and us. How this is done is as follows. Air is “pumped in” to the cabin by tapping it off of the High-Pressure (HP) stage of a jet or turboprop engine. This is called High Pressure or HP Bleed. On some aircrafts, emergency pressurization is tapped off of the Low Pressure or LP Bleed of an engine. Next, this bleed air is cooled through some sort of heating and air-conditioning system before it enters the cabin or pressure vessel. Some of this cooled pressurized air is sent to the air-conditioning system and flows down ducts that are above your head. This air is called gasper air and is controlled by reaching up and turning it as you see fit. Gasper air works in both a pressurized and unpressurized state.

Once the pressurized air is in the cabin, the amount of it is controlled by one or more outflow valves. These valves open and close to maintain the correct amount of differential pressures that is required. On smaller aircrafts (turboprops) these outflow valves are spring controlled. When this type of aircraft is sitting out on the ramp and “powered down”, the outflow valves are closed by this spring loading. When the required amount of differential (diff) pressure is reached the spring opens to maintain this diff. Large aircrafts have their outflow valves controlled by Air Data Computers (ADC's) that are electrically operated.


When an aircraft is on the ground at the gate, it is not pressurized but receives air-conditioning through either an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) or, in some cases, from an outside Air Cart. This Air Cart may be needed not only to maintain air-conditioning, but also to start the engines if the APU is not working.

See http://www.aviationtrainingcenter.com/html/Flying_the_Cabin.html , and also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboprop , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabin_pressurization , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleed_air , http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/how-things-work-cabin-pressure-2870604/?no-ist , and http://www.planeandpilotmag.com/pro...tion-to-a-turboprop.html?start=2#.U-q96XmSf6k .

And here is an interesting image of the cabin pressurization + air-conditioning system on the SAAB 340 turboprop, that shows how tapping off the HP bleed works:





See https://sites.google.com/site/sf340com/air , https://sites.google.com/site/sf340com/home , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_340 , and http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Saab_340 .

Apparently the cabin pressurization of jet-aircraft works more or less the same -- see http://bloga350.blogspot.it/2012/11/a350-xwb-cabin-air-quality-will-make.html :




Interesting: I always wondered how the very cold, thin, low-pressure air outside a passenger jet at 30,000 feet, was warmed and pressurized to feed the cabin. Now I know!

But this raises at least one practical question. As stated in the quote, turboprop airplanes tap the "High-Pressure" (HP) stage of a turboprop engine, and bleed off the high-pressure air. But presumably there is nothing equivalent available in an expedition motorhome driven by an ordinary diesel engine? Could just the turbocharger on an ordinary diesel truck-engine do it?

That turbocharger probably only has enough power to feed the diesel truck-engine with high-pressure air. And furthermore, when driving at extreme altitude, i.e. 15,000 feet, the diesel truck-engine will need all the air that the turbocharger can generate. To summarize: a diesel truck-engine is not a turboprop.

But I am not certain if things are so clear-cut. The following are images of pressurized cabins located behind what appear to be rather conventional non-turboprop aircraft engines:





See http://www.flightlearnings.com/2010/04/14/pressurized-aircraft-part-one/ and http://www.free-online-private-pilot-ground-school.com/auxiliary-aircraft-systems.html .

Now these engines along with their turbochargers were designed from the start to be very "altitude capable", with enough power to both drive the plane and pressurize the cabin to whatever the altitude limit of the plane might be. So one possibility is that, depending on how much camper pressurization is needed, and at what altitude, the specification for the vehicle's main diesel engine would also change.

Here I should remark that I've been thinking in terms of a hybrid-electric set-up in any case, along the lines of the Oshkosh's off-road, miltary-spec "Propulse" system, which was discussed in post #324 on page 34, at http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...pedition-RV-w-Rigid-Torsion-Free-Frame/page34 (standard ExPo pagination). So the diesel engine that I've been envisioning would actually be a diesel-electric generator, whose primary purpose would be to charge either a lithium battery bank, or perhaps even "ultra-capacitors", as per Oshkosh Propulse. Ergo, if cabin pressurization is on the cards after all, then this engine and its turbocharger would only need to be spec'd strong enough to perform well at, say, 16,000 feet, charging the system electrically, as well generating high-pressure air for the camper.


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2. Structural Design of the Camper Shell


The next question would then be, what are the structural design implications for the camper shell?

I've been imagining a fully integrated "one room" camper design in any case, so there would be no cab/camper distinction. I don't have enough engineering background to figure out "on the fly" the force that the air inside a cabin pressurized for 8,000 or 9,000 feet, would exert on a camper shell, when the air outside is the pressure typical at 16,000 feet. Sure, it would be a bit silly to find oneself designing a camper shell as strong as the composite pressure-cylinder barrel on a Bombardier Lear-jet:





See http://www.compositesworld.com/articles/learjet-85-composite-pressurized-cabin-a-cost-cutter . And needless to say, Lear-jets are designed to fly at 30,000 feet, where the pressure differential between outside and inside is huge.

Instead, as egn suggested, perhaps what's only wanted is "lightly pressurized".

But here the question becomes, "how lightly?" Just enough to make the camper "feel" 3,000 feet lower, so that 16,000 feet "feels" like 13,000 feet, or 13,000 feet "feels" like 10,000 feet? Or enough so that 16,000 feet "feels" like 8,000 feet?

If the former "lightly pressurized" scenario, the systems that you linked to for pressurizing off-highway excavators, combines, etc. to prevent infiltration of silica dust, might prove sufficient -- see cab pressurization . These systems seem designed to provide some cab pressure, but certainly not the kind of pressure that a turboprop provides for a plane that flies at 20,000 feet, whose cabin is pressurized to 8,000 or 10,000 feet. I will address such "off-highway, anti-dust" systems in a later post.

But on the other hand, if a much bigger pressure differential is required between camper interior and exterior, then a robust, turbocharger-driven system that follows turboprop precedent might prove necessary. And the structural design of the camper shell would have to follow suit.

These are just questions at this stage, and here I'm really just "thinking out loud".

Any thoughts?


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3. Is Camper Pressurization LPG Compatible?


There's also another issue. If the heater, water-tank, or cooktop in the motorhome were fueled by LPG, then it would be necessary to have "drop down" floor vents to allow excess LPG to escape (LPG is heavier than air), as well as vents up above to allow carbon monoxide to escape. See http://www.gascentralheatinguk.com/Gas in Caravans.htm and http://caravansplus.com.au/catalog/help-gas-installation.php . And both LPG- and diesel-fueled heaters need intake/exhaust ventilation -- see http://www.classicwinnebagos.com/forum/index.php?topic=2640.0 :





So too, LPG-fueled gas absorption fridges require intake/exhaust ventilation -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator and http://www.obrienscamping.co.uk/articles/FridgeInstall.htm :





And finally, any LPG bottles have to be stored in a vented enclosure:





So camper pressurization would seem profoundly incompatible with LPG.

And perhaps also somewhat incompatible with diesel heating?

Any thoughts?

All best wishes,



Biotect


PS -- As for China, I always feel morally compelled to include a bit of political commentary when discussing Chinese infrastructure development in Tibet. Because if I did not, I'd feel that I was simply serving the Chinese propaganda machine.

As must be clear from these posts, I am an ardent technophile, and the Quinghai-Tibet Railway really is an extraordinary technological accomplishment. The National Geographic video does a particularly good job explaining just how extraordinary -- see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo7FBo4mLgU . But it seems clear that in building the railway the Chinese were motivated by politics first (maintaining military control of Tibet), economics second, and the welfare of the Tibetan people was a consideration much lower down their list of objectives, if it was an objective at all. It's like that with all Chinese mega-projects on the Tibetan plateau, including mines and hydro-electric dams.

Later in the thread I will be addressing the emerging "Asian Highway Network", whose central theme will be China's massive infrastructure development on the plateau, and the implications for trans-Asian vehicular traffic, and hence, the design of a globally-capable motorhome. If one takes the long view or the "philosophical" view, one might imagine that this infrastructure could ultimately benefit the Tibetan people as well. Unfortunately the evidence so far suggests that it benefits mainly immigrant Chinese settlers. And because China is not a free country with a free press, the social and environmental impacts of Tibetan mega-projects are never adequately scrutinized. Almost always the victims are hapless indigenous Tibetans who are inadequately consulted, and whose human rights are often trampled.

Perhaps this is the inevitable fate of pre-modern nomads whenever their territory is turned into a commodity by an industrial civilization. And it has to be granted that the Asian Highway network will serve not just China, but also surrounding countries, including a democratic India. A train running from Beijing to Delhi across the Tibetan plateau might boost China/India trade, and might benefit Indians too, just as long as the territorial border disputes can be worked out. So overall, let's just say that I am morally and politically "ambivalent" about Chinese mega-projects. And its seems important to convey something of that ambivalence when I post about the same.
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[biotect]

dwh,

It's perhaps natural enough that many participants on ExPo are worried about America's manufacturing health, because this discussion forum is so dedicated to stuff, to the tools and machines that make overlanding possible.

Again, I know that we're not supposed to get “political” on ExPo, but the question of American manufacturing decline seems to come up often. So I thought I'd add my two cents worth. My perspective might prove a bit different, because I am an Anglophonic German who is familiar with the contrasting German experience. And because my ways of thinking about the problem tend to be more sociological and structural, as opposed to merely moral or political.

Hope that what follows below passes muster with the ExPo censor!


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1. A Few Thoughts on Manufacturing Decline in Anglosphere Countries: CME versus LME


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Earlier in the thread I indicated that I have both German and Canadian passports, and that I strongly favor the Germanic and Nordic "CME" model of collaborative, co-ordinated market capitalism, as opposed to the "LME" of liberal-market capitalism that one finds mainly in Britain and the United States -- see post #305 on page 31 for some discussion of the same, at http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...pedition-RV-w-Rigid-Torsion-Free-Frame/page31 (standard ExPo pagination).

For some background on the contrast between these two models of advanced capitalism, usually called the "Varieties of Capitalism" thesis, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Capitalism , http://www.amazon.co.uk/Varieties-Capitalism-Institutional-Foundations-Comparative/dp/0199247757 , http://digamo.free.fr/hallsosk.pdf , http://www.lse.ac.uk/government/whosWho/profiles/dwsoskice@lseacuk/Hall-Soskice-Intro-VoC-2001.pdf , http://www.cerium.ca/IMG/pdf/HALL-_...introduction_to_varieties_of_capitalism-2.pdf , http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/i.../Hall - Soskice - Varieties of Capitalism.pdf , http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199247752.do , http://scholar.harvard.edu/hall/pub...stitutional-foundations-comparative-advantage , http://nez.uni-muenster.de/download/Literaturbericht_Dominik mit Deckblatt.pdf , and http://myweb.rollins.edu/tlairson/pek/varietycapit.pdf .

Probably the best introductions to the CME versus LME distinction are two recent BBC "Analysis" podcasts:

A. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01cvkg6 , https://player.fm/series/analysis/analysis-neue-labour-02-mar-12 , http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/analysis/analysis_20120305-2100a.mp3 ,

B. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0477nry , https://player.fm/series/analysis/analysis-varieties-of-capitalism-23-june-2014 , http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/analysis/analysis_20140623-2100a.mp3

If you really want to understand the differences between Anglo-American capitalism versus Continental-European capitalism, and the socio-political differences that underpin both, these podcasts are terrific places to begin. They cannot be recommended too highly.

One important feature of the CME model is an apprenticeship system that educates for the needs of industry – see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/14185334 , http://www.bbc.com/news/business-16159943 , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship , http://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/working/prospects-in-germany/vocational-training-in-germany/ , http://www.young-germany.de/topic/s...side-germanys-dual-vocational-training-system , http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...nstyle-vocational-qualifications-8193166.html , http://www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2011/11/britains-labour-market , http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/...y-looks-UK-European-countries-skills-gap.html , http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...rk-study-offer-lure-brightest-youngsters.html .

But Germany's apprenticeship system is only just one component. As all sophisticated observers seem to agree, CME countries have a tightly interwoven, complex and mutually reinforcing system of institutions and values: see http://www.economist.com/node/21552567 , http://www.economist.com/news/busin...d-germanys-it-not-so-easy-copy-german-lessons , http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2013/06/special-report-germany , http://www.economist.com/news/speci...success-are-more-complex-they-seem-dissecting , http://www.economist.com/news/speci...y-europe-needs-rethink-way-it-sees-itself-and , http://www.economist.com/news/speci...e-requires-new-kind-germany-overcoming-demons , http://www.economist.com/node/21552579 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/01/germany-champion-europe , and http://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/special-reports-pdfs/15656906.pdf .

Another major component of Germany's CME model is the "Mittelstand", family-owned medium sized business that focus on high-value-added manufacturing, in top-end market niches where global competition is minimal or non-existent – see for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand , http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/04/germanys-mittelstand , http://cambridgemba.files.wordpress...d-the-thriving-middle-class-the-economist.pdf , http://www.economist.com/node/18061718 , http://www.economist.com/node/17572160 , http://www.economist.com/node/21524922 , http://www.economist.com/news/busin...ing-both-sides-mittelstand-and-middle-kingdom , http://www.economist.com/news/business/21564898-envy-germany's-medium-sized-family-firms-sparks-desire-emulate-them , http://www.gsk.de/uploads/media/Meet-the-Mittelstand_22.01.2014.pdf , http://www.bmwi.de/English/Redaktio...erty=pdf,bereich=bmwi,sprache=en,rwb=true.pdf , and http://www.gtai.de/GTAI/Content/EN/...ago-gtai-german-mittelstand-bremer-121025.pdf .

But the Mittelstand only works because of the apprenticeship education system, and the apprenticeship education system only works because of the Mittelstand. It's a classic chicken-and-egg-problem: which came first? The answer is that both did, co-evolving in tandem over the last 100 years, in concert with all of the other features of Germany's CME model. The second BBC podcast does a very good job explaining how a country's politics, society, economics, system of education, and historical experience – i.e. literally everything – forms a tightly integrated and mutually reinforcing "network". So it would be naive to try to isolate just one factor as explaining recent German economic success.

The apprenticeship system and the Mittelstand in Germany are certainly important, but so too is Germany's history of non-adversarial management/worker relations, high levels of unionization, and worker participation in management decision-making via works councils or direct representation on corporate boards. Ergo "collaborative" or "co-operative" market capitalism, or what the Germans like to call "co-determination" -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany . In Germany the power-gradient between labor and management is relatively "flat"; there is a much lower multiplier between worker's pay and CEO pay than in the Anglosphere, where American CEOs typically make 331 times as much as average workers; and in Germany employees are not automatically laid off in a downturn, if only because their specialized skills might prove invaluable when the economy picks up again – see http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederi...-while-paying-its-auto-workers-twice-as-much/ , http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathryn...rs-774-times-as-much-as-minimum-wage-earners/ , and http://gawker.com/5928298/its-time-to-tie-executive-pay-to-worker-pay .

Furthermore, in Germany companies and banks have a long-termist attitude towards investment, the capitalist class still has a strong sense of paternalistic "noblesse oblige", manual labor is valorized and credentialized via the apprenticeship system, and there is a comparative absence of Anglophonic white collar / blue collar snobbery..... The list of contributing factor is almost endless. Above all, in Germany's more "artisanal" form of capitalism, the Engineer is still King, and his family has typically owned the business for generations. German manufacturing companies exist to make things and employ people over the long-term, not merely to generate profits for shareholders short-term.

All of these bits and pieces work as an integrated whole, with work-place egalitarianism in CME countries reinforcing respect for the apprenticeship system, which in turn inclines bright, ambitious young people to consider an apprenticeship instead of university, and so on. And workplace egalitarianism reinforces support for other kinds of egalitarianism, in housing, salaries, health care, etc. One feedback loop reinforces another, and the overall consequence is a highly egalitarian society with an excellent GINI coefficient. Whereas in LME countries, all the economic and sociological feedback loops seem to operate in reverse, with different kinds of inequality feeding off each other, and only making overall inequality worse and worse with every passing year.

The second BBC Analysis presenter then suggests that a society has to choose between one or the other; it cannot have bits and pieces of both. It has to decide whether it wants to have a "co-ordinated, collaborative market economy" (CME), or a "liberal market economy" (LME). There is no half-way house possible in between.


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2. Manufacturing in Germany, and Financialization in Britain


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One immediate consequence of the CME model is that manufacturing continues to be important in Germany, Austria, and the Nordic countries.

To be sure, in Germany manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has declined since the 1970's, just like all other advanced-capitalist countries. But in CME countries manufacturing has declined less. In the following graph German manufacturing as a percentage of GDP since 1990 has tended to mirror Japan's, declining gradually but not dramatically, and still hovering in the 20 % range:





See https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...unity-and-challenge-for-the-uk-summary-report .

According to this graph, in the United States manufacturing seems to have held more or less steady since 1990 at 15 % of GDP, whereas in the UK manufacturing has fallen from 18 % to about 12 % of GDP.

Of course, some might say that in the United States manufacturing as a percentage of GDP is now nearer 12 % as well:







See http://www.economonitor.com/thought...rgy-production-bring-back-manufacturing-jobs/ , http://www.economist.com/node/21552567 , http://www.economist.com/node/18484080 , and http://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/opto-insider-blog.html .

However, it's important to remember that even though manufacturing as percentage of total U.S. GDP has declined, in absolute terms it continued growing right up to the 2008 crisis. The fourth graph immediately above illustrates this nicely. It's just that other sectors of the U.S. economy have been growing more quickly, hence the decline in overall percentage.

Those are the figures for manufacturing as a percentage of GDP; there also exist figures for manufacturing as a percentage of employment. Here to some extent it depends on how one defines "employment in manufacturing". In an article written in 2005, The Economist stated that less than 10 % of American workers is employed in manufacturing. And the figure might be even lower, because "perhaps half of the workers in a typical manufacturing firm are involved in service-type jobs, such as design, distribution and financial planning, [and so] the true share of workers making things you can drop on your toe may be only 5%." See http://www.economist.com/node/4462685 .

The most dramatic decline for employment in manufacturing took place in Britain, where it dropped from 35 % of the workforce in 1970, to just 14 % in 2005:





Only in Italy and Germany did employment in manufacturing remain above 20 % of the workforce. Since 1990, in Eurozone countries as a whole employment in manufacturing has dropped only 5 %, in marked contrast to much steeper declines in the United State, Britain, and Japan:





The Economist is a decidedly LME sort of publication, so as one might expect, the article went on to argue that there's no cause for Anglospheric alarm. And much of the arguments made by the article seem sensible enough. For instance, although manufacturing output has continued to grow in the Anglosphere, employment has remained steady or shrunk, because of increasing productivity. The analogy here is always to agriculture: only roughly 4 % of Americans now engage in farming, feeding the remaining 96 %, because farming has become so automated and productive. As manufacturing becomes ever more roboticized, the argument goes, the same or fewer workers should be able to produce 2 times, or 5 times, or 10 times more "stuff". Whereas it is much harder to automate services, ergo, the comparative size of services in today's advanced capitalist economies.

All of this is of course true, but it also fails to appreciate the obvious. If manufacturing does not just become more productive, but actually disappears altogether, because it has decamped to Third World countries, then even the more automated kind of manufacturing won't be around anymore to generate ancillary "spin-off" economic activity in services like design, marketing, transport, finance, banking, etc. If a country becomes "overfinancialized" and "overserviced", as Britain did in the 1990's and 2000's, then what does it have left to sell the rest of the world? What can it export, in exchange for the manufactured goods that are now being produced elsewhere?

In the case of Britain, the rarely explicitly stated but widely held assumption was that Britain would export "financial services". London would capitalize on its strength as a center of global finance, as a kind of super-sized Cayman islands. But this only works, of course, as long as London remains attractive as a place for foreigners to do their banking, brokering, financial management, speculating, etc.

Much of this sort of financial activity in Britain depends on foreign good will and enthusiasm for whatever "financial services" or special tax status Britain seems willing to provide, for instance, non-dom residency for foreign billionaires. This sort of financial activity can disappear in a heartbeat if foreign sentiment turns against Britain. Sure, Britain's industrial decline is no cause for concern just as long as foreign corporations and billionaires are still willing to imagine London as their financial capital. And the theory of comparative advantage suggests that every country should rest content to specialize in whatever it does best, engaging in trade with others who do things better in x, y, or z sector. As such, the argument goes, the Indians and the Chinese should focus their minds on mundane matters of manufacturing, and leave the white-collar world of high finance to the Oxbribdge and Ivy-League educated experts in the Anglosphere, in New York and London.

But finance is not like other economic activities, because it is so central to a country's well-being. Outside intervention in currency markets, for instance, can play havoc with a country's exchange rates and its export industries. No doubt the Anglosphere is quite content with continuing Anglospheric financial and banking hegemony, and the ability of a handful of Anglosphere merchant banks to wreck the economics of Third-World countries. But it seems a bit foolish to bet the economic future of one's own country on the premise that countries outside the Anglosphere are equally happy with this state of affairs. And yet British economic policy over the last 20 years has been based on a premise as implausible as this.

Other countries are not "happy" with Anglospheric financial hegemony, they never have been, and they never will be. If China ever gets the chance to displace the dollar with the yuan as the world's reserve currency, or if India gets the chance to do something similar with the rupee, only a fool would think they would not seize the opportunity. It also seems obvious that eventually the Chinese, Indians, and Arabs will want to build up major financial centers and expertise of their own, in Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. And if and when they do, and if they come to feel that they no longer need London, what is Britain left with to sell?

And what it this kind of change in foreign sentiment is happening right now, and explains why Britain has found it so hard to shake off recession?

Here are a few graphs that suggest just how comparatively over-financialized Anglosphere economies have become:





For more about financialization, in Britain as well as the United States, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization , http://www.theguardian.com/business...don-financial-centre-boost-or-harm-uk-economy , http://www.theguardian.com/business...4/uk-economy-seven-things-need-to-know-ons-g7 , http://www.cityam.com/article/financial-services-firms-account-96-cent-uk-s-gdp , http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09282007/watch.html , https://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2011/07/page/2/ , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-k-black/how-the-servant-became-a_b_318010.html ,http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/ , http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../03/11/AR2009031103218.html?wpisrc=newsletter , http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_151-200/WP153.pdf , http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/programs/globalization/financialization/chapter1.pdf , http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/7472/economics/over-financialisation-of-the-economy/ , http://www.ippr.org/publications/dont-bank-on-it-the-financialisation-of-the-uk-economy , http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-con...-Heel-of-Anglo-American-Caplitalism-754KB.pdf , and http://monthlyreview.org/2008/04/01/the-financialization-of-capital-and-the-crisis/ , http://monthlyreview.org/2007/04/01/the-financialization-of-capitalism/ .

The following short blog entry, written by an Austrian economist in 2009, summarizes Britain's dire straits nicely:

Today the British economy is in a mess: North Sea Oil is running out, the manufacturing sector has been reduced to minimal size where supply chains rely on imports, because many semi-finished products are no longer produced in Britain; the financial sector is no longer sustainable in its size and needs to be reduced, but no master plan for substitute value-added is available; the public budget deficit reaches double-digit amounts and the danger of future hyper-inflation or even a public sector default is not negligible. A general election is looming, and so far neither party has come up with a viable plan for the future. Both parties have strong ties to the financial industry, Labour because they promoted its recent rise to dominance, the Tories because many in the highest ranks of the financial sector are their supporters, not only at the polls, but also financially.

See http://kurtbayer.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/from-de-industrialization-to-de-financialization/ . At the level of analysis, this blog entry is just as prescient now as it was in 2009, even if in terms of policy recommendations it falls short.

The contrast here will be with continental-European countries where banking and financial services constitute a more sensible proportion relative to overall GDP, and where they function merely as very boring "utilities" that serve the real economy. In CME countries it is considered obvious that banking should not be the "main event", and that banking and financial services only exists to serve other sectors. Furthermore, in CME counties it is considered obvious that banking should serve innovation in the real economy, and should not be allowed to recklessly innovative itself. After all, what is the "value added" when banking and financial services become so innovative, that their near-meltdown nearly destroys the rest of the economy? In CME countries, all of this is as obvious as 2 = 2 = 4. And it is indicative of just how strange and a bit out of touch with economic "reality" LME countries have become, that for many economists and other kinds of policy specialists in LME countries today, this is no longer obvious at all. Sure, in a globalized world economy it is impossible for advanced capitalist countries to hang on to low-value-added, labor-intensive manufacturing, for instance, textiles. But that's not the kind of manufacturing that Germany does today. Germany circa 2014 manufactures and exports the very-high-valued-added goods that a country like China still cannot make.

Now given Germany's comparative economic health since the 2008 crisis, the immediate economic benefits of a CME economy are real enough. But for many CME advocates, the sociological consequences are just as important. The CME model continues to provide good jobs for people who did not attend university, and again, the complex web of institutions and values of CME countries work together to promote greater equality. Ergo, CME countries tend to have excellent GINI coefficients.


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3. The United States will probably remain LME, but perhaps not Britain


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For economic equality, the upshot is then this: it's quite possible that massive inequality is now virtually inevitable in the United States, because it has a political economy that is so heavily LME, instead of CME. So for the United States to become a more egalitarian society again, it would have to completely overhaul its entire political economy. That's not going to happen any time soon in the United States, although it might happen in Britain, if Ed Miliband's particular brand of Labor gains power.

Ed Miliband, Labor's current leader, is explicit and forthright about his admiration for the German economic model, and he wants British capitalism to become more Germanic, i.e. more CME. And it's not just Ed Miliband: the "Varieties of Capitalism" thesis is now central to the platform of the Labor party as a whole in Britain. For extensive discussion in the press, see http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...wants-us-to-be-more-like-germany-6699327.html , http://labourlist.org/2013/08/could-the-german-economic-model-could-be-ed-milibands-big-idea/ , http://www.bbc.com/news/business-18868704 , http://www.spiegel.de/international...rmany-as-an-economic-role-model-a-898399.html , http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jun/01/labour-policy-chief-germany-inspiration , http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17213556 , http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/01/two-big-lessons-uk-germany-and-nordics , http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/06/germany-success-humanity-medium-firms , http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-17300246 , and http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18432841 .

Britain's current Labor party is so pro-Germanic, that the press has dubbed it "Neue Labor".

But again, sophisticated observers suggest that the choice here is a really an all-or nothing: either an economy is CME, or it's LME, but not both. So for me, one of the really interesting questions of our time is whether Britain can in fact succeed in transforming itself from an LME country, into a CME country. Given just how much manufacturing has shrunk as a percentage of British GDP, even just since 1990, the prospect seems doubtful.

There is this to be said, however. Even if "economic inequality" is not a major item on the political agenda in the United States, it is certainly something that Britain's political and economic elites are talking about. And they are trying to think it through at a very deep level. They realize that high taxation and income redistribution alone are not the answer, and that Germanic and Scandinavian countries are more egalitarian not just because they tax and redistribute. For Britain to become more egalitarian will require, instead, a complete overhaul of virtually every aspect of its economic model. And the really incredible thing is that there are now many people in Britain who are proposing exactly this. If Labor does get elected in Britain in the next cycle, the potential shift in policy priorities might be huge. But it's worth noting that not just Labor is thinking and talking this way. Even the Tories have expressed enormous admiration for various aspects of the German and Scandinavian model.

Britain is a country suffering prolonged crisis, and it has not managed to pull out of the 2008 melt-down as successfully as the United States. 5 years of recession are concentrating British minds powerfully, and many are concluding that only a complete overhaul of Britain's economic model will provide the basis for long-term, sustainable growth.

Furthermore, Britain has not been a world-hegemon for generations, it has reconciled itself to middle-power status, and so perhaps Britain is now more ready than the United States to learn from other countries and their political-economic successes? It also helps that Britain is located so close to the European continent, and so it's very easy for lots of Brits to experience CME egalitarianism firsthand, in action. And not just elite policy-makers. Via “sister city” and “twin town” exchange programs sponsored by the EU, lots of British working class people have had a chance to see how their counterparts live on the continent, i.e. German, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish manufacturing workers – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_towns_and_sister_cities , and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_European_Municipalities_and_Regions .

Of course for Labor in particular, the superior economic justice and dignity that the CME model accords all workers adds to its appeal. But still, to the wider public, even the Labor party does not tend to "sell" CME as more likely to produce a just society, although clearly that's Labor's hope. Rather, Labor primarily touts the CME model as more economically successful and stable; as the more "pragmatic" or "practical" alternative.


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4. A few more reasons why the United States will probably remain LME


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Although some American commentators are also now realizing all of the above, I strongly suspect that the United States will continue on its LME path without deflection, if only because politically speaking it's the easier path, demands the least amount of thought, and requires the least overall of American institutions. And also because right-wing Republicans in the United States might be happier spending 25,000 USD per annum per prisoner incarcerating a huge percentage of America's poor, instead of developing a CME politically economy that would turn them into productive workers via apprenticeship systems instead. Sure, this is economically and politically irrational, but it's a bit naive to expect any country to be economically or politically rational all the time. I also very much doubt that Republicans will support measures to turn the United States into a "full university participation" sort of society, as Labor in Britain tried to do in the 1990's and 2000's. All trends suggest exactly the opposite, in fact.

Often the argument is made that LME countries are "demographically" superior to CME countries, because they have higher rates of immigration, and because their more flexible labor markets seem better than CME countries at absorbing Third-World immigrants, immigrants who have few skills, and can only find employment in poorly paid, dead-end, menial jobs. But this is an argument fraught with difficulties.

To me, this amounts to saying that the United States is superior because it has an economy that:

1. generates lots of "high-end" skilled jobs for native-born Americans from upper-class families, a "knowledge elite" who had access to excellent university educations and advanced degrees;

and

2. it also generates lots of "low-end", unskilled crap-jobs for cooks, waiters, nannies, gardeners, and tellers; jobs for Third-World immigrants who have come to constitute a veritable "servant class"; jobs they seem happy to take.

But if there are fewer and fewer jobs in the middle, jobs that might enable the children of immigrants to step up the ladder, and enjoy some hope of becoming middle or upper-middle class themselves, then this LME model is not sustainable. The first generation of immigrants might be happy to do low-skilled crap-jobs for lousy wages, but not their children.

Furthermore, if there are no longer decent jobs in the middle, then native-born Americans who are not bright enough to attend university and join the "knowledge elite", will find themselves on a road to what the French call "declassement", i.e. loss of class privilege. They will find themselves born into the American middle class, but falling gradually into in the lower middle class, and then the working poor, as middle-of-the-road jobs disappear. And who will they blame? You guessed it: low-skilled immigrants.

The LME model seems to be creating a new kind of super-high-tech, massively class-stratified and unequal society, in which the owners of capital – i.e. the owners of the machines that are automating everything – enjoy an ultra-priveleged existence, while the remaining 90 % are left to perform increasingly menial crap-jobs, of the kind that have not yet been automated. This argument has been put forward most clearly by the French Leftist economist Thomas Piketty – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty , http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.eu/en/piketty-thomas/ , http://www.economist.com/topics/thomas-piketty , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century , http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/05/economist-explains , http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2014/04/thomas-piketty , http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/07/thomas-piketty-history-money , http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/17/thomas-piketty-lse-capitalism-talk , http://www.theguardian.com/business...dishonest-criticism-economics-book-inequality , http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/05/thomas-pikettys-capital , http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/06/thomas-pikettys-capital , and http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2014/04/inequality .

It's as if United States is becoming a series of First-World research parks surrounded by a ghetto that's just as large, or larger. And no, I am not suggesting that the Third World is an American ghetto. Rather, I am suggesting large swathes of urban America are coming to resemble the Third World. Again, astute observers have been noticing this for quite some time, and the prominent German sociologist Ulrich Beck calls this development the "Brazilianization" of the Anglosphere – see http://www.answers.com/topic/brazilianization . Sure, in the Anglosphere lots of research goes on, lots of science, and lots of design and computer engineering. But comparatively little manufacturing, because low-end manufacturing is better performed by developing countries, and high-end manufacturing is better performed by advanced capitalist CME countries. See the following Economist article in particular, which addresses this point very clearly – http://www.economist.com/node/18621224 .

Sure, elite "knowledge workers" in Anglosphere LME countries enjoy incredible salaries and lifestyles. And because this Anglosphere elite continues to generate software companies like Google, it can afford to import lots of products manufactured by developing and CME countries. But the Anglosphere elite is surrounded by a huge underclass of black Americans and recent Hispanic immigrants, as well as a shrinking white middle-class that has no hope of joining the elite, and that increasingly cannot afford those same products manufactured by developing and CME countries.

Although this economic and sociological pattern seems disastrous, and really shocks European visitors when they first experience it, privileged Americans now seem mostly habituated to it, and do not seem sufficiently motivated to change it. It's perhaps too comfortable to be a well-paid American knowledge worker, making a terrific salary, paying low taxes, and being able to hire recently arrived, low-wage housekeepers and gardeners from Central American countries.... ..And as long as the American elite remains too comfortable – and as long as it continues to apologize for America's LME model because it seems to generate lots of low-wage jobs for housekeepers and gardeners – the United States is unlikely to change.


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5. Attitudes towards Human Capital in LME versus CME: Investing in People, or not.....


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As the BBC podcasts referenced at the beginning make abundantly clear, CME countries view "investment in people" or the development of "human capital" as not just a social objective, but also as an economic necessity. For instance, without the apprenticeship system, the German Mittelstand would fail. Whereas an LME country like the United States seems to take the exact opposite view of human capital.

First off, an LME country like the United States seems willing to abandon lower-skill workers who only have high-school degrees to their fate as unemployable, and since the 1970's the United States has been systematically cutting back on what few vocational or retraining programs that it once had -- see http://www.economist.com/node/18618613 . Of course, there is still the United States military, where many American boys from poor backgrounds in effect obtain a "Germanic" apprenticeship-style vocational education. Many of the best transport mechanics in the United States are ex-military. But they have to be willing to kill or die for their country to get this training, and this seems like a high price to pay just to get a lower-middle-class job.

Second, an LME country like the United States will claim that it pours its resources into university-level education instead. And for a while it was true that American university-participation rates were better than most OECD countries. But as the article just cited suggests, over the last 10 years many OECD countries, both LME and CME, have caught up and surpassed the United States even vis-a-vis university participation. Amongst American men in particular, the university graduation rate for those aged 15 - 34 is now lower than it is for those aged 45 to 54. Quoting the article at length:

A second explanation is that American men have let their schooling slide. Those aged between 25 and 34 are less likely to have a degree than 45- to 54-year-olds. As David Autor of MIT points out, they are also less likely to have completed college than their contemporaries in Britain, Denmark, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain. In recent years America's university graduation rates have slipped from near the top of the world league to the middle. Men are far likelier than women to drop out. Their record at school is bad too. This educational decline has a racial edge. Black and Hispanic boys are far less likely to graduate from high school than white or Asian youths. A smaller fraction starts college and a larger fraction drops out.

So it is simply beyond me how America's LME model could possibly prove sustainable over the long run.

Extolling the virtues of LME because it generates lots of crap, dead-end service jobs at the bottom end for low-skillled immigrants, just does seem an awfully perverse form of apology. If that's what being a country "open to immigrants" means, then immigration is over-rated, and immigration is not a good way to try to solve rich-country demographic stagnation. Please note that here I am speaking as the son of immigrants, and as such, I tend to take a favorable view of immigration. But Canadian-style immigration, not American-style immigration. Low-skilled immigration is not good for the receiving country, and it's also not good for those immigrating. First-generation low-skilled immigrants to the United States might consider themselves very lucky, because they are no longer desperately poor in Mexico or Central America. But their children will feel differently. As their children grow up attending bad schools, find that they can't get into and/or can't afford a university education, and find themselves with little choice but to work at crap "service" jobs for life, jobs no better than the crap jobs performed by their parents, they will grow bitter and resentful.

Simultaneously, the LME model in the United States is unsustainable because it seems to entail massive "declassement" for a huge portion of the native-born middle class, for those unable to move up into the "knowledge elite".

In short, given its current direction, the LME model in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Britain, seems increasingly a powder keg waiting to explode. Whereas German and Scandinavian countries are still countries organized by and for the middle class and the working class. They are not countries organized to make things better only for a tiny elite at the top.

All I can say is that, if I had to be born working-class or lower-middle-class somewhere on planet earth, I would infinitely prefer being born German or Scandinavian instead of American. And indeed, the most recent empirical data strongly support this conclusion -- see http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/u...le-class-is-no-longer-the-worlds-richest.html and http://www.economist.com/news/21566430-where-be-born-2013-lottery-life .


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6. Some Closing Thoughts on Entrepreneurship and Innovation


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Now the standard riposte to the above line of reasoning will argue that, sure, perhaps the United States is becoming a series of First-World research parks surrounded by Third-World squalor. But at least the United States has those research parks. At least the United States remains the world's most "innovative" economy, even if the United States has a political economy that is grossly unjust. At least the United States remains a society very good at generating new ideas and processes, and quick to adapt to new technologies and opportunities – for instance, like shale gas fracking. And no doubt this is (partly) true.

However, measuring innovation is notoriously hard, and the extent to which the United States leads in innovation – or whether in fact it does lead – is open to dispute. Compare the following two charts in The Economist . In one the United States has a huge lead in entrepreneurship, venture capital, and hence, presumably, innovation. Whereas in the second, the American lead is more moderate – see http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/07/daily-chart-14 and http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2013/10/daily-chart-3 :





Furthermore, it strikes me as a bit artificial to treat European countries as separate, if only because the EU's economy has become so integrated.

So it seems that what’s always missing from such rankings is a measurement that combines EU countries (and that includes Switzerland, because the Swiss economy is now so linked to the EU). What's missing is a ranking that compares an overall EU result to the United States + Canada. European companies like Siemens or BMW now have research and manufacturing capability spread across the EU, and so the “innovation quotient” of Germany really does need to be added to France, Italy, Sweden, and Britain…..

If researchers were rigorous, they would try to measure innovation solely on a per-capita basis. But when they assess the number of “high quality” patent filings, for instance, or top universities, it seems that they often do not calibrate for per-capita in this way – see for instance http://www.bloomberg.com/slideshow/2013-02-01/50-most-innovative-countries.html#slide51 . The merit of the first graph posted above, is that both measurements (entrepreneurship, venture capital) are per-capita percentages, and not absolute numbers.

In any case, a number of important indices now suggest that the United States is no longer top of the league for innovation, and actually ranks 10[SUP]th[/SUP]: out-ranked by Switzerland, the Netherlands, etc. For instance, see WIPO’s important “global innovation index”, at http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/content.aspx?page=data-analysis , http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/content.aspx?page=gii-home , and http://www.wipo.int/portal/en/index.html .

The following article in Forbes also admits as much – http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/01/02/is-the-u-s-really-losing-its-innovative-edge/ . This Forbes article is significant, because it is written in defense of the U.S. And yet it, too, admits that the U.S. is now lagging behind other countries in terms of important hard metrics that correlate with innovation, like graduation rates in Math & Science, or Patent applications. It then merely counter-argues that America’s culture of “open-ness”, dissent, entrepreneurship, and brutal competition, more than make up for the recent shortfall in hard metrics.

I am not so sure. Yes, the United States still has a political economy that encourages the kind of risk-taking that produces radically new ideas, especially in IT and financial services. But if those ideas are confined to just one or two sectors, and if they do not “spill over” into other sectors like manufacturing; or if American innovations are simply bought up by companies located abroad, in countries that still have significant manufacturing capability, then the overall “economic benefit” of such American innovations will prove marginal. A given American innovation will benefit a factory worker in Taiwan, but not in Kentucky. In other words, the analysis in this Forbes article seems completely superficial.

A number of articles have appeared recently written in response to innovation rankings that demote the United States. They all have one thing in common: they point out the obvious, namely, that innovation in isolation is not what matters most to an economy, in the long run. Rather, what economies want is innovation that makes a real difference to goods and services, innovation that is deeply “linked” to the wider economy – see for instance http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/sunday-review/america-the-innovative.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 , http://www.zdnet.com/whats-making-scandinavia-more-innovative-than-the-us-7000000392/ , and http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/why-germany-dominates-the-u-s-in-innovation/ . Below are some lengthy quotes, in sequence:

As the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel put it to me in an interview, American innovation in recent decades has been remarkably narrowly based. “It has been confined largely to information technology and financial services,” he said. “By contrast in transportation, for instance, we are hardly more advanced today than we were 40 years ago. The story is similar in treating cancer….”

…. if East Asian culture is not a serious hindrance to technological creativity — and presumably neither Intel nor Applied Materials think it is — why are East Asian scientists and engineers generally typecast as underachievers? Part of the explanation is that there are different kinds of technological creativity. Fundamental breakthroughs generate headlines and win Nobel Prizes, but as Ralph Gomory pointed out, it is the more mundane task of turning breakthroughs into affordable products that matters economically. East Asian corporations tend to focus on this second task, and though the details of their “continuous improvement” in production technology are rarely noted in the press, their success has been a driver of the region’s spectacular enrichment in the last 60 years.

…..apparently the Scandinavian countries are punching above their weight in innovation due to the right "linkages" between education, infrastructure, human capital and market/business 'sophistication'. Consequently, their "outputs" -- knowledge, technology and creativity -- are far larger relative to their inputs, which include each nation's political, business, and ICT underpinnings, R&D and so on.

True, Americans do well at inventing. The U.S. has the world’s most sophisticated system of financing radical ideas, and the results have been impressive, from Google to Facebook to Twitter. But the fairy tale that the U.S. is better at radical innovation than other countries has been shown in repeated studies to be untrue. Germany is just as good as the U.S. in the most radical technologies.
What’s more important, Germany is better at adapting inventions to industry and spreading them throughout the business sector. Much German innovation involves infusing old products and processes with new ideas and capabilities or recombining elements of old, stagnant sectors into new, vibrant ones…..

It also explains why Germany’s industrial base hasn’t been decimated, as America’s has. Germany is better at sustaining employment growth and productivity, while expanding citizens’ real incomes. Even with wages and benefits that are higher than those in the U.S. by 66%, manufacturing in Germany employed 22% of the workforce and contributed 21% of GDP in 2010. The bottom line: German manufacturers are contributing significantly to employment growth and real income expansion.

In the U.S., by contrast, fewer and fewer people are employed in middle-class manufacturing jobs. In 2010, just under 11% of the workforce was employed in manufacturing, and manufacturing contributed 13% of GDP. Inequality is on the rise, and the country’s balance of payments is getting worse……

Germany understands that innovation must result in productivity gains that are widespread, rather than concentrated in the high-tech sector of the moment. As a consequence, Germany doesn’t only seek to form new industries, it also infuses its existing industries with new ideas and technologies. For example, look at how much of a new BMW is based on innovation in information and communication technologies, and how many of the best German software programmers go to work for Mercedes-Benz. The U.S., by contrast, lets old industries die instead of renewing them with new technologies and innovation. As a result, we don’t have healthy cohesive industries; we have isolated silos. An American PhD student in computer science never even thinks about a career in the automobile industry — or, for that matter, other manufacturing-related fields…..

Germany actively coordinates these factors, creating a virtuous cycle among them. Germany innovates in order to empower workers and improve their productivity; the U.S. focuses on technologies that reduce or eliminate the need to hire those pesky wage-seeking human beings. Germany’s innovations create and sustain good jobs across the spectrum of workers’ educational attainment; American innovation, at best, creates jobs at Amazon’s fulfillment centers and in Apple stores.

It’s high time for the U.S. to revamp its innovation system. Americans need to recognize that the purpose of innovation isn’t to produce wildly popular internet services. It’s to sustain productivity and employment growth in order to ensure real income expansion……

The last article quoted is particularly insightful, and deserves to be read in full. It appeared in the Harvard Business Review (HBR) -- again, see and http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/why-germany-dominates-the-u-s-in-innovation/ . However, while everything that it says is true, at the level of both analysis and “policy recommendation” it does not dig nearly deep enough.

From a “Varieties of Capitalism” perspective, what this last article is really struggling to say is that CME countries like Germany and Sweden are much better at reaping the full fruits of innovation, so as to benefit the economy and society as a whole. CME countries are much better at providing excellent jobs not just for university graduates, but so too, for the manufacturing workers produced by apprenticeship systems.

The first article also makes the excellent point that, from an economic perspective, the cumulative, seemingly minor shop-floor improvements suggested by fully engaged workers, will matter as much or more to a company’s long-term manufacturing success, than the more formal R&D-type efforts of PhD’s. But workers are only “fully engaged” and proactive in more egalitarian CME countries where they are accorded dignity and respect, not LME countries. In LME countries like the United States, manufacturing workers tend to be treated as just so much expendable cannon fodder.

Furthermore, in terms of policy recommendation, what the HBR article really needs to say, is that if the United States wants to genuinely reap the rewards of innovation, then it needs to radically overhaul its entire political economy, and become a CME country instead. If the United States wants to stop being a massively class-stratified society, one that produces jobs for university-educated software engineers at one extreme, and McJobs at the other, and not many jobs in between, then the United States has to stop being an LME country.

Now sure, there is the alternative possibility that, instead of becoming CME, the United States should instead capitalize on its strengths (for instance, still reasonably high levels of university participation), to become even more LME. See for instance http://www.theatlantic.com/business...-most-innovative-country-in-the-world/248430/ . It’s a valid point of view, and this alternative was also suggested a number of times in the BBC podcasts about LME versus CME. But it will be interesting to see if “going for broke on LME” actually works as a strategy, where by “works” I mean “produces a good society 40 years from now”. And needless to say, important metrics here will be things like the GINI coefficient, and not just the overall level of “innovation” in the abstract. If the United States is still an LME 40 years from now, and has an even worse GINI coefficient, then it really does not matter how “innovative” it is in the abstract. As a society, it should be and will be considered a failure, by most objective observers.

To state the obvious: “innovation” is not a primary end-in-itself, not even an economic end-in-itself. Rather, “innovation” is merely a secondary instrumental good, a means to more important economic objectives like “productivity and employment growth in order to ensure real income expansion”, as suggested by the Harvard Business Review article quoted at length above. One often detects a kind of “fetishization” of innovation amongst American apologists: an uncritical belief that “new ideas” are simply good in and of themselves. Even if "new ideas" make no difference to the economic prosperity of the average American worker, and even if they are immediately bought up by foreign companies that capitalize on them instead.

In sum, even if the CME model were less economically productive, or less innovative, I would still strongly prefer to be born in a CME country, as opposed to an LME country, simply because CME countries are more egalitarian and just. But all indications are that CME countries are not only more socially and economically just, they are also at least as productive as LME countries; indeed, usually more so in manufacturing. And they are just as innovative, especially in terms of the kinds of innovation that generate real "local" value-added, employment, and improved incomes for all.


***************************************


7. Found the Concept Drawing for the partially converted Tatra


***************************************


On a completely different topic: seems like I found the concept drawing for the partially completed Tatra conversion -- see http://www.cj-8.com/forum/showthrea...*-Ultimate-Apocalypse-Zombie-Survival-Vehicle! .

Here it is, along with an additional image of the NBC system, as well the other images collected so far, plus the Craigslist description:







From the “Bangshift” website, where most of the original Craigslist information is preserved – see http://bangshift.com/general-news/c...rv-1985-tatra-t-815-czech-built-military-8x8/:

Full Info From Ad:


TATRA T-815 (8×8 Wheel Drive) — “Expedition Vehicle” / R.V. Conversion —– 9,800 miles

V12 Twin Turbo Charged, Air-Cooled Multifuel Engine. This 8×8 Wheel Drive vehicle has a towing capacity of 200,000lbs. Perfect running condition – Only has 9,800 miles on the clock. Not even run in.

This military vehicle was said to have been captured in “Operation Desert Storm”. This partial complete “R.V. Conversion project vehicle is for the “Adventurer Who Dares to Build Their Dream Vehicle”.

DETAILS of CUSTOM PROJECT

CUSTOMIZED: FROM “CARGO-TRUCK” to “R.V”

* CHASSIS MODIFICATION – CUSTOM: Truck has been extended by additional 5ft

* “SLIDE OUTS” – CUSTOM: Fitted with 2-Custom 12ft opposing hydraulic Slide Outs (Hydraulic Pump and all fittings are available but not yet hooked up)

* “SUNDECK” – CUSTOM: A custom fold down “Sun Deck” is located on the Right Rear Side of the vehicle. When folded up (Closed) the “Sun-Deck” seals off the Door Entry Way for added security. When “Sun-Deck” is folded down, you can access the “Tilt-Up-Roof” for the Sun-Deck. The “Sun Deck” roof framing has been pressure tested to accommodate water mist sprayers for additional outdoor relaxation and comfort.

* “ROOF SEATING AREA” – CUSTOM: A roof seating area is located on top of the cab roof and is accessible by stairway leading up from the RV living Area.

* “OBSERVATION DECK” – CUSTOM: Is located on the roof and accessible by stairway leading up from the RV living Area.

* “STORAGE AREA” – CUSTOM: At the rear of the vehicle is a lockable tilt up lift gate to access additional storage area. Perfect for propane tanks and drinking water filtration systems. The “Sun-Deck” railings are configured to be stored in the lift gates frame work.

* WATER & FUEL STORAGE AREA – CUSTOM: Behind the rear wheels of the vehicle and situated in the frame chassis, is an area allocated to add additional fuel and water tanks. Heavy structural design with 1/4″ plating to protect tanks. Note: Tanks need to be fabricated – not included.

* TOW HITCH – CUSTOM: The original complex tow hitch system mounted, on the truck, was removed and relocated into the new heavy duty rear bumper system.

* AIR PURIFICATION: In the rear of the cab is a “Chemical Warfare Air Purification” System which feeds 8-gas masks.

* TIRE INFLATION SYSTEM: Tires can be inflated or pressure dropped from inside the cab (Similar to Military Humvee’s)

* HYDRAULIC WINCH: Is located under the mid section chassis and cables can be routed to the front or rear of the vehicle. This is controlled from the cab area

* WORKSHOP MANUALS: Owner & parts manual is included.

* TOOLS: A variety of tools is included along with gas masks and some spare emergency parts.

At this point the project requires to be cladded on the outside. All interior & exterior plywood paneling has been tailor cut, treated and ready for installation. The outside “Sheet Metal Cladding” has been cut and bent to size and shape and ready for installation – included in price. Note that Hydraulic pump & equipment for the 2-slide outs (12′ wide) is available for this project but not included in the above sale price. This also applies to the hydraulic pump system and 4-heavy duty self leveling jacks that are available for the vehicle.

Note that a custom built trailer has also been built for this project. It has additional steel fuel tanks, S/S tanks for water – All this is fabricated into the floor. Not included in the sale of the TATRA T-815.

———- 9,800 Miles (Not Run In Yet)

———- V-12 (Multi-Fuel Engine)

———- V-12 (Multi-Fuel Engine)

———- Twin Turbo Charged

———- Air Cooled

———- 355HP

* VEHICLE CURB WEIGHT:

———- 36,000lbs

* LOAD CARRYING CAPACITY:

———- On Bed: 20,680 Lbs

———- Tow Weight: 220,000 Lbs

* TRACTION:

———- Full Time 8×8 Drive

———- Moment Torque Axle Divider

———- Differential Locks


Note that at the very beginning of the thread, on page 1, post #9, egn posted the same concept drawing -- see http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...-8x8-Expedition-RV-w-Rigid-Torsion-Free-Frame :

In 2005/2006 my decision was between Kamaz, Tatra and MAN KAT. Therefore I have collected a lot of images and other information about thess vehicles. I found the following image of an integrated Tatra 815 8x8 off-road vehicle. The construction was already started, but some time later the website disappeared.


View attachment 219744


At this time I also thought about of an integrated solution for the KAT and liked for potential builders. One of this builders was http://www.der-fehntjer.de . I looked for something like image 219. But I had to drop this idea after decision for MAN KAT, because of the engine placement.

All best wishes,


Biotect

 

[cwsqbm]

But everyone knows I'm a conspiracy theorist. What most don't know, is that I've also got a genius level IQ (certified by a team from the UCLA Dept. of Psychology when I was 11), so maybe I'm not as crazy as I seem. (Then again...maybe I'm crazier than I seem. ))

Nothing worse that stating on the internet "I have a high IQ".

As for pressurization, I wouldn't try it for a ground vehicle. Ignoring the structural issues of the design, the amount of energy necessary to do it to any significant degree for a camper would mean a decent sized engine would need to run all the time. It makes sense for planes because the added energy to pressurize the plane is more than offset by the reduction in drag by flying at high attitudes. On the other hand, in a truck you might find that over half your fuel is going just to maintain pressurization.

For high attitude travel, I'd take a different approach, similar to what small non-pressurized planes - deliver oxygen directly to the person. A O2 generator could easily run off a set of batteries while you sleep. Small planes traditionally have gotten their O2 from on-board tanks, but O2 generators (like the ones used for medical purposes) are starting to be used since they don't need to be refilled after every flight.

 

[dwh]

When an aircraft is on the ground at the gate, it is not pressurized but receives air-conditioning through either an Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) or, in some cases, from an outside Air Cart. This Air Cart may be needed not only to maintain air-conditioning, but also to start the engines if the APU is not working.

Long ago in a past life, I used to work at first DFW and then at LAX airports. I was a certified aviation fueler as well as what is known as a "ramp agent" (though in the business we called it "ramp rat"). I'm checked out on every piece of equipment used on the ramp at a major airport.

Lemme tell you, that bloody Air Cart is THE scariest damned machine I've EVER used.

It's a turbine engine bolted to a trailer and it feeds pressurized air through a flex hose about a foot in diameter. The locking collar on the end of that hose has bearing locks like a mechanic's "quick-connect" for air lines - only a LOT bigger. When you connect it to the plane, you just know this sucker is gonna fail.

So here's the machine, engine screaming at about a bazillion RPM a foot away from the operator (you literally "feel it in your bones"), the air hose has about a bazillion psi running through it (you can step on it and it's harder than a rock), and there's the operator (me), hiding behind the machine because if anything goes wrong with that air hose or that connector, it's gonna be a giant out of control "Air Firehose Whip of Death, Doom and Destruction". I almost never feel fear, but that lash-up certainly had my FULL attention.

---------------------

As for where to get air pressure on a truck - most of the big ones have air brakes and "always on" compressors. The governor has to regulate the pressure between 85 and 130 psi. So the pressure is no problem. I could see where volume *might* be - but if some designer/engineer type ran the numbers, I bet he would discover that there is more than adequate volume from that system to maintain 10k' density altitude (as long as the seals were adequate).

Just make BLOODY DAMNED SURE there are no hydrocarbon by-products from the engine getting into the cabin air system!

---------------------

Diesel-Electric eh? I'll see that and raise you one Hydro-Electric.

Back in 1979, when I was 18, just for giggles I decided to design (I took 2 years of drafting and 1 year of mechanical drawing in middle school and I've always loved to do design work as a hobby) a chassis for a "human-equivalent" robot. (Human-equivalent being about the same size, weight, strength and speed of a human.) I finally settled on what I called a "micro-pneumatics" system. I ran into a problem though - battery run time. Then I discovered something that apparently rocket scientists had known all along - diminishing returns, (Discovering things that others have known all along is one of the drawbacks to being autodidactic. But what the hell, it's one of the fun things too.) When you double the battery capacity, you don't get double the run time, because you've added weight to the chassis. Same thing happens when trying to boost payload into orbit. Add payload, you gotta add thrust, which means adding fuel, which compounds the problem, etc.

So I decided to incorporate a power plant into the chassis. Went round and round with fuels, and finally settled on hydrogen (no carbon in the exhaust). To burn the hydrogen and spin an electric generator, I designed what I called a "micro-jet" engine. Then I discovered something which apparently rocket scientists had known all along - you can't store hydrogen worth a damn. This stuff just will not stay where you put it. Being the lightest element, to hydrogen, any sort of container just looks like Swiss cheese. Also, it's certainly not safe. Dangerous really.

Decades later, Dr. Bob Lazar did eventually figure out how to safely store the stuff and got a patent on it.


So here's whatcha do:

Get yourself some of those nifty Dr. Lazar hydrogen storage tanks.
And a nifty hydrogen "generator" (I don't like that nomenclature, I call it an electrolyzer, but everyone else calls it a generator) cart.
And then, get yourself one or two of those nifty new Bladon micro-jet engines (the same as used in that sexy Jaguar C-X75) to power an electric generator or two. Tell Bladon to set them up to run on hydrogen.

Okay, now you have everything except water, which you need in order to separate it into Rocket Fuel (hydrogen and oxygen).

Hell...that's no problem! Two words - Atmospheric Condenser. They make them in all sorts of sizes, and I do recall seeing some smaller ones for marine use.

So now, you have a closed system, that refills its own fuel tank directly from the air. The only problem of course, is that you'll never electrolyze the water fast enough to drive the truck, so you'll have to keep those turbines running 24/7 to recharge the batteries AND power the water maker.

Have fun running the numbers on that one. (I did. )
It'll work.

FIRST RTW UNREFUELED!
FIRST RTW IN AN ELECTRIC VEHICLE! (? maybe, I dunno)
DITTO HYBRID! (?)
DITTO HYDRO-ELECTRIC! (?)
DITTO WATER-POWERED! (?)

Call the guys over at The Guiness Book. (Nice thing about being first, is no one can ever knock that record down.)

--------------------

Propane? Why?

Don't need it for the fridge/freezer - 12v or 24v DC slow-start freon compressors are so efficient, you're WAY better off running the fridge from electricity. Check out Nova Kool (and don't forget the Cold Plate technology).

Don't need it for the cooktop, you've got a big battery bank just chock full o' electricity.

Don't need it for heating, you can get that from the exhaust of your micro-jets, or if you do go with diesel electric, there are many diesel fired heaters.

For RTW (round the world) ExPo types, propane has been passé for ages.

 

[biotect]

dwh,


Wow. Speechless (almost).

This has got to be the coolest idea I've yet seen posted on ExPo. :bowdown:

Thank you.



Biotect


...now if you wouldn't mind just deleting your post, so that my thesis supervisors think it's my own crazy-fantastic-wild-original idea, for a Round-the-World expedition motorhome concept vehicle that is truly over the top.....

 

[dwh]

(Predictable as clockwork.)

Nothing worse that stating on the internet "I have a high IQ".

Oh, its got nothing to do with the Internet. I've learned a few things over the years on the subject.



A) "That and a nickel'll getcha a cup of coffee." (Nowadays, replace "a nickel with "a dollar".)

High-Q or not, you still gotta work (and study) your butt off.


B) EVERYONE HATES someone who is smarter than they are.

After decades of considering that fact, I still haven't definitely decided if it's nature or nurture. I remember practically from the first day of grade school, hearing things like, "You think you're so smart" (you say that like it's a bad thing, but I don't think it is), or "You think you're smarter than everyone else" (statistically, in any group of people, SOMEONE is - most of the time, I'm pretty sure it's me). I doubt those chilluns was trained that way at such an early age, so I've always leaned toward the cause as the genetic programming that eliminates any freaks, deviants or just different from the local tribal gene pool. I'm the blackass baboon on a planet full of redass baboons.

This is probably also the basis for "potlatch". No one in the tribe is allowed to rise too far above the others in the tribe.


C) NEVER tell anyone what your real IQ is. (And when I said "genius level IQ" I actually, as I always do, seriously understated the truth.)

They won't ever believe you. Not sure why. Maybe it's because I'm 6'4" and people have habitually been trained to think of big guys as "Tiny" or "Moose". That was facetious; actually, I'm pretty sure it's simply that no one CAN believe in anything they can't imagine. So everything has to be reduced (like God) to something most people can imagine, then they can believe it. But they can't do that with me, so they can't possibly imagine what the inside of my head is like, so they can't possibly believe in (or perhaps, accept is a better word) the high IQ. So when I was a teenager I came up with a standard reply whenever someone asks me what my IQ is - "Oh, it's unbelievable."


D) Haters will hate.

Castaneda called them "petty tyrants". The world is 90% petty tyrants who will do their damnedest to hold back anyone who moves ahead of the pack or just takes a different road. I just wind up to Ramming Speed and plow right through them. "Catch me if you can!" "Eat my dust!" "Die, puny human!"

And honestly, why should I have to hide it? It's a simple fact. It's not like I just admitted to having a fetish for simulated dead chicks. (Real Dolls - everyone calls them lifelike, I call them deathlike.) I'm certainly NOT ASHAMED of having a high IQ.

And there is NO CHANCE that you or anyone else will ever make me feel ashamed of it.

And really...who cares what the haters think? They're not very good at thinking to begin with. Most of them can't put three thoughts together in a row without screwing it up.


If I feel like talking about it, I will. And I reject anyone else's self-proclaimed right to judge me for it.

 

[biotect]

For high attitude travel, I'd take a different approach, similar to what small non-pressurized planes - deliver oxygen directly to the person. A O2 generator could easily run off a set of batteries while you sleep. Small planes traditionally have gotten their O2 from on-board tanks, but O2 generators (like the ones used for medical purposes) are starting to be used since they don't need to be refilled after every flight.

cwsqbm,

Have to admit that I am inclined in this direction, if only because personally speaking, I've never had much of a problem with altitude sickness. There's also the problem that I want the Terraliner to have slide-outs and a pop-up. Even though Valid slides have pneumatic inflatable seals, these seals probably could not withstand a significant pressure differential between the camper interior and exterior. See http://www.validmanufacturing.com/index.php?pid=2 , and see the following video that provides a tour of a Newell Coach (Newell Coaches use Valid Slides):


[video=youtube;pLdONL3hnOw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLdONL3hnOw [/video]


Now the passenger cars on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway are in fact very lightly pressurized, if only to keep the more richly oxygenated atmosphere inside the train "uncontaminated" by the less richly oxygenated atmosphere outside the train. Did you read Wired magazine's description of the railway's solution, on page 43, post #421? Instead of heavily pressurizing the passenger cars, the Qinghai-Tibet Railway enriches the oxygen content from 21 % to 23 %:

....the system will provide air that is 23 percent O2 (normal air is 21 percent oxygen). Passengers will feel like they're at only about 10,000 feet. The 2 percent improvement may sound small, but it can mean the difference between riding in comfort and gasping for air.

See http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/chinarail.html?pg=3&topic=chinarail&topic_set . This solution works seems to work well enough for most people at 16,000 feet, so full-camper pressurization to a 10,000 foot level is probably unnecessary.

As you then suggest, a portable medical O2 generator would do the trick. However, it would have to be one that works well even when the O2 in the atmosphere is much less dense at 16,000 feet. So the companies that made the Qinghai-Tibet Railway's "membrane oxygen separators" might be worth investigating: see http://www.leader-gas.com/En/Tech/ed4cfafd72f57cc0.html and http://www.leader-gas.com/En/News_Details/c450d23878336a84.html , http://www.airproducts.com , and http://www.airproducts.com/company/...roduce-enriched-oxygen-for-qinghai-tibet.aspx . Also see the National Geographic video about the railway, which describes this particular membrane technology at length, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo7FBo4mLgU , near the end of the video.

In addition to this "general dispersal" O2 enrichment system, the Terraliner could also be equipped with more individualized nozzles for plastic hoses, as per the Qinghai-Tibet Railway; or as you suggest, as per non-pressurized planes. The nozzles wouldn't need to be located everywhere. Just in the driving cab area, and beside beds.

As for very lightly pressurizing the camper, dwh's suggestion that pressurized air could be obtained from the truck's air brakes and "always on" compressor seems worth investigating.

Another possibility is using an pressurized air filtration systems designed for the operator-cabs in off-highway construction vehicles, farm tractors, off-road mining trucks, etc. (Again, dwh, thanks for this lead!). These systems are designed to eliminate lung-destroying silica dust, and combine air filtration with positive cab pressurization:









And here is a video about silicosis, the malady that these light pressurization systems are designed to prevent:


[video=youtube;R_sC2wX9Uwc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_sC2wX9Uwc [/video]


See http://www.brotec.nl/en/overdruk , http://www.brotec.nl/en/brofil-b10 , https://picasaweb.google.com/111114880299355075325/BrofilOverdrukFilterSystemen , http://www.enginaire.com/cabaire/ , http://www.oemoffhighway.com/article/11080603/its-what-you-cant-see-that-can-kill-you , http://safeairfiltration.com/models# , http://safeairfiltration.com/overview , http://safeairfiltration.com/silica , http://safeairfiltration.com/silica/about/what_is_silicosis , http://www.rencool.com.au/cabin-pressurisers.html , http://www.cpwrconstructionsolution...n/704/cab-filtration-for-heavy-equipment.html , http://www.cleanairfilter.com , http://www.cleanairfilter.com/#!fps-55 , http://www.sy-klone.com/mm5/merchan...=SI&Product_Code=NW-R-CASE01&Category_Code=NW , and http://www.sy-klone.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=NW-R-CASE03&Category_Code=NW , http://www.sy-klone.com/mm5/graphics/00000001/PDF_files/reference/TheCaseForRESPA-withReferences.pdf .

This light pressurization technology seems simple and compact enough, and would not require that the turbocharger on the Terraliner's engine be kept running just to maintain light camper pressurization.

All best wishes,



Biotect

 

[dwh]

dwh,


Wow. Speechless (almost).

This has got to be the coolest idea I've yet seen posted on ExPo. :bowdown:

Thank you.



Biotect

No worries. Take it and run with it. Since I've never been materialistic, I don't have the funds to do it myself. Nor do I have any desire to do any fund-raising. You have my blessing.

Add an electric motorcycle from Zero Motorcycles, and you can have someone ride scout for the RTW and grab the first RTW on an electric motorcycle for the record collection.

Some more data: A buddy of mine rode a 2 year motorcycle RTW. I can never remember if he did 56 countries and 52k miles, or vice versa. No matter, figure an average of 500 miles per week. You can surely get your electric truck to move 100 miles a day, 5 days a week (at the least) and so could easily do an RTW in 2 years with the Hydro-Electric rig. Say 4 hours of driving per day, and 24 hours of energy from the generators per day. (And don't forget, the truck is aerodynamically a brick - so the higher the speed, the more energy is consumed. Slower = further.)

I'll leave the rest of the math as an excersize for the reader.

...now if you wouldn't mind just deleting your post, so that my thesis supervisors think it's my own crazy-fantastic-wild-original idea, for a Round-the-World expedition motorhome concept vehicle that is truly over the top.....

Well, everything has its price. What's on the table?

Just kidding. I think I've got you covered there.

You can use the Napoleon Hill defense: "Well, in the book Think and Grow Rich, Hill pointed out how most tycoons believe that ideas just 'come from the ether' and occur to several people at once. So it's really not so strange that I'd have the same idea."

Or, how about the quantum defense: "Well, he had the idea originally years ago, so it's certainly had time to propagate through the quantum entanglement network and ingrain itself into the 'collective unconscious'". (You can substitute 'consensus reality' as needed depending on the prof's bias).

 

[dwh]

A few thoughts...

Big trucks don't get their pressurized air from the truck's turbocharger. They usually have a belt or gear driven air compressor hanging off the front of the engine as an accessory. You could also just use an electric air compressor, which wouldn't require the engine to be running. Forget the turbo, it's too hot to mess with.

Yea, you could just use nasal cannulae from an oxy "generator" (there's that bad nomenclature again...). That wouldn't do anything for the dust problem of course, and not a lot of fun when sleeping.

Slideouts and popups will move around from road vibration. From what I've heard, pretty much everywhere in the world has roads. And pretty much all of those roads are bad roads. If you're going to design for RTW, design for 12 hours a day of washboard.


About the economics analysis. Just like the China politics, I think that's way off-topic for this thread, so I'm gonna leave it be. I will say that one of the reasons I stopped working at the airport and became an electrician instead was because airline deregulation in the US stripped all of the airline unions of any sort of powerbase from which to negotiate (which eventually led to almost all of the unions being fatally weakened (except those piece of crap teacher's unions whose leadership screwed everyone by trading away wages in exchange for iron-clad job security)), but the electrician's union is pretty well bulletproof.

I haven't reviewed all the discussion you presented, but a quick look-see shows me that there is a lot of Ivory Tower gloss to much of it. In the real world, you've got plenty of uber-rich regularly practicing colonial, fascist, feudalistic lords and masters over the serfs types of behavior. That has to be taken into account in any significant analysis of the global economy.

But again, way off-topic.