#we get like 4 hours of electricity per day the limited time frame does not work well with my mysterious brain passages

[melenthropy]

havent been able to draw much lately

[leverage-commentary]

Leverage Season 2, Episode 10, The Runway Job, Audio Commentary Transcript

[Silence]

John: Marc?

Marc: Hi, I'm Marc Roskin, Producer and Director of this episode.

John: I'm John Rogers, Executive Producer, and the one with the Guinness, so you have no excuse for missing that cue.

Albert: And I'm Albert Kim, I'm the writer of the Runway Job.

John: Here we go. And this is a great opening sequence, what- is this a set Marc Roskin? How did you create this incredible look?

Marc: This is the largest girls school uniform factory on the west coast, and they-

John: So this is some sort of internet connection where you order school uniforms or-?

Marc: It was very hot. No, this was-

Albert: Strangely Marc knows a lot about girls’ school uniforms. I don’t know why, but-

Marc: Yes, this was an actual working factory. A lot of the background workers are some of the factory employees who knew how to operate the machines. It was right across the river, really close, and they opened their doors to us just like everybody did in Portland.

John: I love the fact that we wanted to do a fake sweatshop, so when we shot in there, when they saw the hours they shot the workers in the fake sweatshop, we're like, ‘These hours are horrible. How can you people work under these conditions?’ And Albert, since we’ve just seen someone collapse with these- this great shop, which, actually, I believe was the pitch. How did you come up with the idea for the episode?

Albert: Well as you know, I'm quite the fashion icon in the office, so it was quite natural for me.

[Laughter]

John: Yes.

Albert: No, I knew that I wanted to set an episode in the fashion world because it seemed like a fun environment to get into, and lots of great visuals and scenes with models and fashion designers and runway shows. So I knew the area was there, and then so the trick was coming up with a sympathetic victim, and then, as always, a credible villain and threat. So I did a little research and finding the victim wasn't too tough, because the real- in the real world, the fashion industry has sort of been dogged by allegations of sweatshop abuse for a while, so having the sweatshop victim came fairly easy. Finding the threat required a little more research, but as I dug into it, I found that it was actually a real world connection between sweatshops and global clothing counterfeiting, which is controlled by the Chinese Triads.

John: It's interesting because a lot of people talk about intellectual rights and stuff in new international treaties and people immediately think of movies, television, digital rights. A lot of it also involved intellectual rights on clothing.

Albert: Yes. Clothing counterfeiting actually counts for more of the income of these Triads than illegal narcotics trade. So it’s a huge billion dollar business for them and right then, sort of, the pieces fell into place for the elements of the episode.

John: And now these actresses are, Marc?

Marc: That is- um-

Albert: Jen.

Marc: Cathy Vu.

Albert: Cathy Vu and Jen Hong.

Marc: On our left and Jen Hong, and they were great though local Portland actresses. And they knew how to speak some Mandariarin and it worked out great. This was actually, in the shooting order, Jeri Ryan's first episode working with us.

John: Yeah, it's really interesting because, you know, the crew- the cast was genuinely kind of freaked out by Gina not being on set, and so a lot of the weird vibe you get on this episode is from ‘there's a new person’ and of course Jeri became great friends with everyone and really fit in, but it was a really interesting vibe the first couple days on set. It really felt like, yes, Jeri’s a new person here; we don't quite know how to handle it.

Marc: But we had to play it like she was already part of the team because we shot these out of order.

John: It does help that really you don't make her part of the team until the end of the previous episode. 

Marc: Right.

John: This is almost a cold relaunch.

Albert: And we played that in the episode, too, so you sort of everyone's tentativeness around her worked well for the dynamics within- the character dynamics within the story as well.

John: And this is, again, this wass also a scene we added just to- It was interesting, we really wanted to make sure that everyone understood that Sophie- Because originally there was going to be a giant gap between episodes, we wanted to make sure everyone understood Sophie signs off on this. You know, audiences were very attached to Gina Bellman - rightfully so - and we did not want them to think we were shuffling her off and bringing in a new actor. We listen to you. Not a lot, not really.

[Laughter]

John: But we do listen to the bigger screams. Also love the callback there that Hardison screwed up in the Ice Man and that's what motivated this entire- this entire replacement.

Marc: We always like to bring up Hardison's screw ups; blowing up offices and whatnot.

John: Blowing up offices. But it's interesting that this is one of those trios where you just kind of park the camera and, you know, they have the dialogue, just let them run; let them do 4 or 5 versions, get the hell out of their way.

Albert: And this scene is really our version of: the kids are wondering where mommy went. You know, so it's like they are a little uncomfortable, it's a new family dynamic, so they're on the phone with her.

John: Yeah.

Marc: Right. But of course, they don't want dad to know that they are speaking to mom.

Albert: Yeah.

John: Yeah, and that's a- that actually started in Ice Man, where they are calling and not telling Nate. And we continued it all the way through where they just don't feel comfortable letting Nate know. And that was a nice little moment with Beth, you know, just ‘I miss you’. It's not often we crack the shell on Parker, that's part of the advancement of the character, to show that she's comfortable in the family, even if she’s not comfortable with other humans. And these two actors the- not those actors, that's stock photography- but the two actors playing the bad guys are?

Marc: Grace and what's her last name?

Albert: Grace Hsu and Tom Choi.

Marc: Grace was a Portland local, she was fabulous; and Tom came from Los Angeles. They did a really great job. 

John: The con here is kind of convoluted. It's interesting, just watching this, is the idea that we really had to come into the fashion show from- the fashion industry is one of those industries where if you're inside it, you know everything. We had to constantly figure out, what does the audience need to know in order to understand what we're doing without overexplaining it?

Albert: Right. Again, this is a case where research helped. I mean, to actually looking into what happens during fashions shows. It's based on a real life event, Fashion Week, which normally takes place in New York though there are regional ones all around the country where there are big showcases for new designers as well as opportunities for the stylish designers to bring out their new lines and things like that. So we knew we had an event that was tied to a specific time which helped; it gave us a very limited time frame. And then, again, researching into how the Triads operate and what their connection is to the clothing industry. All of that just helped flesh out the con.

John: I love the Parker giving her instructions on how to be photographed, you know Sophie gave her instructions three weeks ago for some other con. And this was kind of fun, creating the idea for how do you create- in modern media, how do you create the illusion of an actual human existing for some period of time, object permanence to a great degree?

Albert: Right.

John: So you figured out how to- you know, my wife watches a lot of fashion TV and it was kind of backing up: how do I actually know who the hell any of these people are? And it was because of the fashion shows and magazines. Cover both of those and you're done. And DVRs have certainly been a boon. And also this, printing off one magazine it's actually easier than we made it look. 

Albert: Yeah.

Marc: Oh yeah.

John: There's actually a service that prints off short runs of magazines that you can use if you're say doing a trade show or running a con.

Albert: This was all done on location. Beautiful house. This beautiful house in- was it in Clackamas?

Marc: Yeah, just outside of Clackamas.

Albert: It was great. It was a huge mansion that worked perfectly, and we ended up recreating the mansion later when we blow it up.

John: Also that what they're doing there, where they are looping, that's exactly what it looks like at Electric Entertainment - it’s basically just a laptop and a mic in the kitchen and that's how we finish up these episodes. No, but it was fun to be able to say, ‘Oh well, put the words on her mouth when we’re on her back, just like we do with actors.’ 

Marc: Right.

John: Presently, Tim Hutton delivers no more than 50% of the dialogue you hear per episode. We put the rest in his mouth later with a cunning Tim Hutton imitator. Yeah, this is to close off the sale that she's locked in.

Marc: Yeah, just to continue the sale.

John: Now Marc, you directed a bunch of episodes by this point, coming into this, right?

Marc: Yes.

John: And what was it like having a new human on the staff?

Marc: It was interesting. We- it brought a new life to it, and was interesting to see how everybody worked together. And she was just trying to get a feel for everybody and, you know, she was really easy going and said, ‘Listen, if you want a different performance, please, I'm here to help you guys.’

John: ‘Who likes to do this style? Who likes to do that style? Is that head writer really drinking that much in the middle of the day?’ Basic questions.

Marc: What is that smell coming from his trailer?

John: It's shame. It's the smell of shame. This scene was actually not in the original shoot, right? We wound up- this is one of the scenes that was: how much do we explain to the audience? Do they explain what Fashion Week is or isn't? And when we kinda looked at the first cut, it was like, you know what? I know because I watch it on Saturday morning on fashion TV, but we gotta make sure we establish the rules.

Albert: Right. Just a little more explanation as to how the fashion world works and where the con is going; just another step in the process.

John: And an excuse to get Aldis in orange.

Marc: Exactly and have Aldis in orange and Eliot in mascara.

John: That's eye makeup, that's not mascara.

Marc: Sorry.

John: Don’t. Please. Please, I don't want that phone call again, don't make that mistake.

[Laughter]

Albert: What's great about that factory, even this part of this set was also in that factory. 

Marc: This was just another portion of it.

John: Wait, so all the dresses and stuff, did we bring those in or those were-?

Marc: Yeah, we just put up the bolts of fabric and some employees.

Albert: We spent a lot of time in that sweatshop.

John: Yeah. As one does.

Marc: As one does. 

John: I love, by the way, in this episode, just watching what Kane is doing behind her during this scene. I'm- he's making a lot of interesting choices for Eliot there. Especially with the card snap coming up. And this was a lot of fun, too; this was a lot of the fun of the show is learning all the rules and idiosyncrasies of each industry.

Albert: Sure, that's part of the formula is figuring out what's the interesting world you can look into and then diving into and explaining to the audience how these worlds work.

Marc: Well it's funny, cause she needs to explain it to her teammates on the show.

John: And the card! I love the card delivery.

Marc: And the card the bam, yeah, you get to explain it to the teammates and explain it to the audience as well.

John: We’re really replicating what we’re doing in the room. Which is, one person knows the field pretty well and they explain- I remember when we did Iceman and we were talking about getting the serial numbers off the diamonds and Chris Downey was like, ‘I'm not following’ and I went, ‘It's like getting VIN numbers off a car’. ‘Oh, ok perfect!’ And that wound up in the script. Also this was fun having somebody who didn't know how the earbuds worked; it kinda reset the rules for the audience. And some beautiful- how did we get all this beautiful Boston stock footage?

Marc: Some we bought, some we shot. 

John: You actually went out and shot a lot.

Marc: I did. Myself and Dave Connell spent a couple days running around the great city of Boston.

John: Now this is your directing debut, isn’t it Albert?

Albert: It wasn’t my debut, but it was probably the longest sequence I've done.

John: And it's just naked backs.

Albert: It was just tedious, grueling labor to just have to order these models around to take off their clothes and take off their shoes. No, it was great, it was. We already had the set, we finished the big scenes in the set, so Marc let me take a few people out and just get as much fun behind the scenes stuff you can, so that’s kind of where we ended up.

Marc: You and Norbert, right?

Albert: Yeah, Norbert. That was one of his first days there.

John: I love the hair. Whose idea was the Swiss Miss hair?

Albert: Well the other thing about this episode was hair, makeup, wardrobe, obviously had a field day with it. They were really excited about being able to put their best foot forward on a lot of this stuff, so they were able to-

Marc: Yeah, they really had a good time.

John: I also love the fact that Hardison is basically using CIA technique of human intel signals  and analysis on the PA’s on a fashion show to figure out who’s in charge without actually figuring it out. It's a lot of fun, and our friend Apollo Robbins helped us out with the envelope slip, and it helps that Beth is very good-

Marc: This girl is great; she was a lot of fun, this girl, Caitlyn, Caitlyn Larimore. We- she read for us a few times on other things; we just knew there was gonna be something for her eventually.

John: So really, if you're looking to act, you should get out of whatever little LA or New York, whatever little hick town you're in and move to Portland because that's where you're gonna get some work.

Marc: Move to Portland; that's where it's gonna happen.

John: This actually hacking into the printer is something we've done before. A favorite trick of Apollo is to print stuff out in your office when you don't realize something is about to happen. And then the slide- 

Marc: That wonderful calligraphy on those envelopes was my mother in-law’s.

John: Really? That's great.

Marc: Yes, Louise.

John: We didn’t pay her did we?

Marc: Oh god no.

John: Alright, just making sure. We are a cable show.

Albert: But she ends up featured as a featured extra in the episode, too. She's in the fashion show; you'll see her later staring down Parker.

John: Mother-in-law? You got your mother-in-law on tv?

Marc: That's right.

John: Wow, you're the best son-in-law ever. This actress- actually nice shot. We wound up repeating that character later. I remember we were kinda restructuring; we were like, ‘Oh, we can just use her again, that’s fine.’

Albert: I remember watching her read, and she was great at it, so we decided to, rather than use a separate character for a scene later on, just, you know, bring her back. And she wound up doing that scene later when they approach the security people.

John: Just some love for the extra, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ A little something from Eliot just for you.

Marc: Just a little.

Albert: Well he had to know that if you're gonna do a fashion episode, one with lots of models, that Eliot was gonna be right in the thick of things there.

John: Yeah. And the overheard- How did you stage this? The overheard conversation is a staple of the show and the bane of all directors everywhere.

Marc: Yeah, we didn't have a lot of time on this day, but we figured out a way; just keep her in the background, eventually a couple close ups of her ears perk, and soon they'll drag her in deeper. 

John: Now each one of them is doing a specific person. I can't remember, he's doing-

Marc: Lagerfeld.

John: He's doing Lagerfeld. She’s doing Donatella Versace. I can't remember the British guy that Hardison is locked in on, cause I remember Aldis actually had pictures of him. I’m trying to remember...

Albert: André Leon Talley from Vogue, who is the legendary creative director of Vogue. And he's sort of channeling him. But yeah, again, during the course of research-

Marc: I got my ladder shot in there, by the way. I'm just two for two on-

John: On having ladders in your-

Marc: Yeah.

John: That's good; that's excellent.

Albert: This whole set was built; this was the whole fashion show.

John: We actually built this in the museum that we shot the finale for 207 in, right?

Marc: No, this was just an empty warehouse. 

John: Did we have permission?

Marc: Yes we did.

John: Good. Cause sometimes we don't; sometimes we just build stuff and then get the hell out before the cops show.

Marc: Yes, we used a lot of fabric to hide things.

Albert: But the beauty of it is, if you go to real fashion shows, it's kind of what it is. The highlight of fashions shows are supposed to be the clothes, so they keep the surroundings very minimal, and that's- that's always the idea of a fashion show. So luckily for us, it's fairly easy to recreate realistically as a set.

Marc: A lot of times it's just a wedding tent and a runway and chairs.

Albert: Well anyone who's watched Project Runway can see what it's like. It’s just a runway and some folding chairs.

John: I thought we built- that's interesting. Where did we go back to the museum for? I can't remember; it's gonna drive me crazy. Whose idea was the buckles?

Albert: Buckles was something I came up with in the script when I was trying to figure out how to explain what a poor designer Gloria is.

John: What's the one thing nobody likes a lot of?

Marc: Buckles.

Albert: So it became a little joke that someone that- someone, I think it was Chris actually pitched the joke about ‘pilgrim chic’ which we put in there, and found out later that that's actually kind of a real thing. If you make up any kind of joke in the fashion world you'll find out eventually that it's a real thing somewhere.

John: Yes.

Marc: This was actually the workers rec room, which was pretty much an open area room and- 

John: You're kind of ruining the whole sweatshop vibe with, like, ‘They had a rec room.’

Marc: Yeah, they had a rec room and basically we've pretty much four walled it. 

John: Yup.

Marc: And, you know, put in-

John: Which means?

Marc: To put up a wall to close it off. 

John: So this is a bigger space behind him.

Marc: Yeah, it's actually pretty much the same size, but it's just a platform where they had their lunch table set up. But we liked the ability to have shots like that where we can look down onto the floor, it was always-

John: And then shoot back up.

Marc: It was always something that I know that you guys mention, that we wanna have more connection with our victims. So we placed that shot-

John: It is tricky, particularly when we’re doing complicated ones, you can lose track of that vic that's in the opening, and we really tried this year to tie it back a little bit more.

Albert: Yeah, it was interesting. I had a conversation with another writer just the other day about - who works on a crime procedural - and they have the same issue about how to connect with their victims. It's much harder for them because usually their victims are dead. So they show up in the beginning dead, and they can wrap things up with the relative of the victim at the end. If you notice, what a lot of crime shows do is they have flashbacks, so then you get to learn the personality of the victims through the flashbacks.

John: Oh, interesting.

Albert: So we don't do that, but our victims are alive so there are opportunities, like in this scene, to reconnect with the people who we’re working for and establish what our emotional stakes are.

John: And this is also one of the places where we sort of set up- and if you watch what we did with Jeri’s character, and sort of the difference between Sophie and Tara Cole. Tara Cole is a short grifter. Sophie is never gonna push it, she's never gonna try to get the big payout. And Tara’s job is to get in and get out with as much money as possible, so this is one of the times where we really sort of set up how she needs to adjust. Though when you look at the back half, we don't really change it that much. The team doesn't really change, it's- she kind of adjusts herself to fit in the team a bit more. They wind up using her short term push just as a different sort of batter.

Albert: Whereas personality-wise, there's something you told me I remember which helped make everything click which was - Tara is really kind of a guy’s girl. You know, she's the kind of girl who sits around and watches football with the guys on Sundays. Sophie is very much a girl's girl; she's out there doing the shopping and fashion and all that stuff. So that kind of distinguishes the two characters. Although they fulfill the same role within the team, they're very distinctive in terms of their personality. 

John: But that's also from when we originally created the show. A lot of these characters have slightly different personalities, and the actors brought other personalities, and we realized as long as that job was fulfilled in the team, you can range pretty widely within there. How did you shoot- where the hell is she?

Albert: She's supposed to be-

Marc: Tashkent, right?

Albert: Tashkent. So- 

John: Uzbekistan?

Albert: Yes.

John: Oh right there you go. Of course. ‘Cause Tashkent is in Uzbekistan. Who doesn't know that?

Albert: Right.

Marc: And yes, so we shot Gina on a much later date, during a later episode, and just one green screen and some stock footage behind a little wind machine and there you are.

Albert: And camels.

Marc: And some camels, yes.

John: As one has in Tashkent. 

Marc: In Portland.

John: Oh no, we went to the Portland zoo see, I was hoping you'd give them the whole speech about sand, and yeah. That's a little bit of jealousy, a little bit of- and that was another thing, too, to make sure that Sophie wasn't just a character that you checked in with once a week. She had to have her own little arc that whenever you went to her she had a distinct attitude about the team. Yes and the reindeer gag, which I really foolishly insisted on keeping in the script because it was my favorite bit.

Albert: It was brilliant; it was great; it was all John.

John: That's mine. Whenever you see a joke that doesn't quite work and seems kind of doomed but we keep, that's usually me diggin in at the table, particularly if it's absurdist. Now did we put banners up or is that digital?

Marc: Digital. Those were digital banners on the building. Do our little whip pans to Eliot and whip back. 

John: Just to establish, yes, he's with a model. Where do you think he was gonna be? And he’s out.

Marc: And he's angry he has to leave the model.

John: The- and again, it was interesting to, sort of, know that we had to plot out these arcs on the back six, and figuring out exactly, like, how do we show trust and acceptance? And, you know, you can do it in dialogue, but you don't want people talking about their intentions. And the ear bud became kind of an interesting metaphor; it goes in and out of use over the back six and even with Eliot we wound up using it.

Marc: Yeah, it's like the chief asking for your gun and badge.

John: Yeah, exactly. And it also solved the problem later when you know it’s- she shouldn't have heard X. 

Albert: Right.

John: And that's a big problem on the show is in theory, if they can all hear each other’s conversations... Whereas a lot of cop shows, a big chunk of the time is, ‘What did you find out from witness x, Billy?’ What did you find out about witness y? Alright now let's put it together.’ They know. Now how did we do this blow?

Marc: Now that wass digital smoke, and that is a model.

Albert: Green screen model.

Marc: Yeah, we modeled the windows and actually shot it in our parking lot right here in Highland, in Santa Monica Boulevard.

John: Now we built- we do builds on the- building’s blowing up is better with models. The cars we've found we can do just digitally, but the buildings really look great with the model.

Marc: But we still use the model for the car as well. We just don't have the time or the money to do full explosions, you know, we do just a little aftermath with some debris and smoke.

Albert: Especially when it's someone's real house.

Marc: Yes.

Albert: Don't want to-

John: Generally they kind of frown on that, of just blow out the windows.

Albert: Because last year we did, Marc and I worked on another episode where we blow up a warehouse. And it was an abandoned warehouse, so you blow out the windows and break the glass, so it's not such a big deal.

Marc: Yeah, we did a little damage to the Prison Break set on that. What they shot was-

John: I remember, because I pulled up the day you were shooting that, I was like ‘I hope I haven't missed the blow.’ I was a quarter mile away and my windshield shook and I'm like OK, that was a little bigger than we anticipated’.

Albert: But this was a house with six kids was it?

Marc: Six kids, yeah.

Albert: So it was-

John: So blowing it up wouldn't have changed it all that much.

Albert: Probably not. Actually that family was incredibly neat.

John: And this is a lot of fun. And again, this is where, if you pay attention, we never tell you Tara’s backstory; if you pay attention all six episodes, you can figure out exactly what Tara used to do before she became a con woman. The information she knows, the way she puts stuff together, you’ll figure it out. Also the yelling. This was a lot of fun, because Eliot would be annoyed in this situation, and Chris Kane is never funnier than when Eliot is incredibly annoyed.

Marc: That’s right, and it's usually with Hardison.

John: Yeah. Thank you, I don't know how you make this show without phone cameras I really- we couldn't have made this show in 1978 this would've been a lot harder.

Albert: Or earbuds.

John: Or earbuds. Well earbuds we could've got around, but- no earbuds might have made our life easier, actually.

Albert: This was another thing that came up in research, actually, when I wrote a book about the Chinese Triads, and it is actually true that they're signature weapon is a meat cleaver. We looked at a few pictures of them, they're pretty impressive; they are really big and they have engravings on them, stuff like that. I've also looked at way too many pictures of victims of the Triads.

Marc: Yeah, missing fingers, and hands, and arms.

Albert: But that, again, it just added another fun element, knowing that there was, in reality there was a signature weapon that they use, and gave Eliot another fight scene.

John: Of course they'd be fancy meat cleavers, you're not gonna just pick a meat cleaver at Tesco or the kitchen section of Best Buy; you're gonna get one specially made. This was a lot of fun, too, something we haven't done in a while, which was watching Eliot figure out his fight space. You know, control access doing the math in this head. You know, it's always a little easier if no ones around him, just so he can tear people around a little easier. Fun stunt. Jerri did this, right?

Marc: Yeah, she was really nervous about doing her first fight with us, but she was a trooper; she did a great job.

John: She actually killed that guy. I feel a little bad about that, that's the first time we've admitted that, but you know. This was one of my favorite fights, cause we don't do a lot of weapon fights.

Marc: Yeah.

John: And it really reads well; the cleavers read real. Also we do a nice fight style with Chris here.

Albert: We did use cleavers back in the first season with the Wedding Job.

John: Oh that's right, we had the kitchen thing.

Albert: A kitchen thing. But it was a different kind of fight; it was a one on one in an enclosed space. This was an open space with multiple attackers ,and again, different props to use. So like, you saw the mannequin dummy there, and the rolling carts, and things like that, and so it ended up being a really fun scene.

John: And again, thank god for the surveillance culture - the fact that there are so many traffic cameras. Although you may bitch about privacy, it really helps us.

Marc: It really, really helps us.

John: This was interesting. This- I forget how this came up, I think the fact he had two IDs, but they had only checked one. I had a friend who was a Mountie- and remember, we were talking about my buddy who had done undercover up in Canada, and gh said the problem was, the guys got the fake, ran up records on fake Canadian IDs and you never knew the original crimes. Yeah. ‘Hey, how does Tara Cole know how to handle a meat cleaver?’ You’ll find-

Marc: Yup.

John: There you go, and that's a nice hit. And the head butt. I love the head butt, I'm sorry, man, that's a great way to end a fight.

Marc: She gets to take part.

John: Also, there's a lot of really nice hair flipping around in that fight scene, I gotta say.

Marc: I love-

John: I don't know whose looks better.

Marc: It's like a [Unintelligible. Sounds like ‘Germat’?] commercial.

[Laughter]

John: And that's, again, one of the problems with having a really uber competent team is, ‘OK they would have run this guy's background. What is the one loophole we could find that Hardison could screw up?’ You know, it's not screw up, it's nobody’s perfect.

Albert: It's just overlooked.

John: That's the trick, it has to always be some sort of fair play thing. Not a mistake, not just a ‘I didn't look in that drawer.’ This is a legitimate loophole.

Albert: Look how great this location is, though. It's everywhere; there's stuff everywhere. We really would not have been able to duplicate this on a set. 

Marc: No.

John: What? No?

Marc: Never. 

John: I love that he keeps the voice up here. That killed me here the first time I saw the dalies I was like, ‘Is he still doing Lagerfeld’?

Marc: Jack Bouvier. 

John: Yeah the fingerless gloves are really the pièce de résistance there. There's a lot of stuff there that could be on anybody, but the fingerless gloves really digs in.

Albert: Again, that's straight out of the Lagerfeld book.

Marc: Tim went for it.

John: Are those glasses actually rose tinted?

Albert: Yes.

John: Yes they are, that's magnificent. And the evil speech of evil: ‘Listen, I'm just a businessman. I have obligations.’ You know, in his head he's keeping many people employed back in China. You know, and he's a copy fighter, he's like those electronic freedom foundation guys who doesn't believe in copyright.

Albert: He's a hero, really.

John: He is a hero.

Albert: Of his own story, but- 

John: Exactly, he just happens to interact with our story. 

Albert: Exactly.

John: And this is actually a cue, this is a hint to where Nate’s- This winds up being the first episode of the second half of the season. This is kind of a hint of where Nate’s arc is going for the season, where he's getting so addicted to control and not losing and beating the bad guy, he's starting to make poor decisions. And he makes a series of remarkably poor decisions through the back six that really just the competence of the team protects him from.

Albert: He's kind of like those football teams that keep pulling it out in the 4th quarter and just decide that's just what they have to do. So they don’t mind coasting through the rest of the game or even, you know, getting down and behind before then.

John: Yeah it's- it's the mental discipline, and something that Parker says later on in the season which is, ‘Be the Nate Ford that we came back for.’ The mental discipline that made him legendary and which they count on is starting to slip. And it's not because of the booze, it's because of what he's substituting the booze with.

Marc: Right.

John: This is me drinking my Guinness, by the way.

[Laughter]

Albert: It's not your Guinness, it's what you’re substituting for the Guinness.

John: No, no, this is my Guinness; I'm actually drinking.

Albert: Oh ok. It's actually another Guiness that is substituting for his Guinness.

[Laughter]

John: It's, again, a Guinness that's somewhere else that I would like to be drinking. Some bargaining, trying to get them to take Eliot instead of Jeri.

Marc: That wasn't something he planned for. 

John: No, no, and it's interesting, and again, this is all trust issues. She kind of volunteered herself for this position, she’s, you know- 

Albert: The trick is, part of the whole episode was really the character dynamics. Because it was a new character, because it was a new team member, even though she'd been introduced in the episode beforehand, this is really the first full con they run together as a team. So it was a very tricky thing, and so I had the outlines of what the broad strokes would be, but this is the point when you go to the show runner and you say, ‘John how does this work, exactly?’ And then John takes over.

John: We stare at the ceiling and- that's what the writers room is for. And this is great, we actually wound up paralleling this shot. You created this shot for this episode, Marc; we wound up paralleling this argument in, like, two other episodes. There's actually a similar version of this shot in the first half in the season finale, where it's like, we are now sitting judgment of Nate Ford, and we’re a little distrubed that we’re not feeling very comfortable here. Yeah, and this cutting pattern replicates, and it’s interesting, and it's because we have editors working over certain episodes that make certain choices. And those are I think the names of-

Albert: They were real Electric Entertainment employees.

John: ‘Maybe I want to meet...’ Yes. Hardison is the most hard done by character; he never gets what he wants. And that, again, is one of those things where this episode was shot in 6 ½ days.

Marc: Yes, there's my mother-in-law.

John: There you go; she's a lovely woman.

Marc: A lovely woman.

John: Are you checking the list of actors to pick her name up? That's not good.

Marc: No, gosh no.

John: You know, we had four different ways this scam works. All depending on exactly how this shooting schedule worked out. And I remember I had to sit down with my wife and I was like, ‘Alright’, cause she's big into this, I was like, ‘Exactly what is the timing and choreography on a fashion show?’ And there, the thing with the dresses and they're all transported across town. So it was a good lesson for writers is, the great thing about TV is you're shooting every week; the really great thing about TV that will also drive you crazy is, you learn how to have a bunch of choices. Because sometimes the world decides not cooperate with you, and you can't shut down production for two days and just go- You've worked on big films, you've seen this. Like, ‘You know what? We're just gonna take a day off and find the right location.’

Marc: Yes.

John: No. Not so much.

Albert: The scene coming up with Parker in the gown. This is really, if you think about it and you say that you're gonna do an episode with the Leverage team involved in the fashion world, kind of the promise of the premise is you're gonna get Parker in a fashion show. In a gown, in a fashion show.

John: Right, because she's the one person who would despise it.

Albert: Right, and you kind of have to deliver this scene.

John: This was also shot later, and it was interesting because we don't usually get Parker and Eliot- you know, Parker and Eliot in a two-hander. And if you go back, you can see in the back half of the season when we- especially when we saw how it worked out in The Lost Heir Job, it became kind of a little more standard that we go to this partnership. You also see it pop up in the bottle show, the bar show, what the hell did we call it?

Marc: Bottle Job.

John: We called it The Bottle Job, that's right.

Marc: The problem with doing these two-handers is he can get her to laugh and break.

John: Yeah, Chris can crack Beth up. Him doing the dirty dresses on the floor line, Beth I think broke character maybe ten times because we are in the basement shooting that day. 

Marc: And this is the dress that Nadine our costume designer built.

Albert: Yeah.

John: It's a pretty amazing dress.

Marc: A beautiful dress.

John: The thumb drive of intent. Thank you thumb drive, for giving us a short hand so audiences know what we're doing. 

Marc: Yes, so she basically- you'll see that all of the Andre V, that's the Andre V character, has a touch of yellow in it.

John: That's right. Nadine created a unified theme for the fashion line - the fake fashion line that we were doing. 

Albert: She created an actual line.

Marc: Yeah, so she created a whole line and there's a touch of yellow in everything and as you’ll see when we get to the runway-

John: Where's this dress? We should auction this dress off.

Albert: Nadine probably has it.

Marc: It's actually in my car.

John: Oh no. I wish I didn't know that.

Marc: And then Dave Connell carried it with the lighting design as well.

John: Oh that's great, that is great. It's like we do this for a living.

Marc: Almost.

John: I love that Parker does the most- the little slide across the spot; that's a lot of fun. And now, did you shoot this at night? You had how many days on this set?

Marc: I think we did this-

John: You had the day, which was the warm up and then-

Marc: I think we had this location for two days.

John: That's not bad.

Marc: That's Jeffery Gilbert who played Andre V; he was just great. And I love Parker with the moves.

John: With the big head turn.

Marc: Just for a moment she thinks she got it under control, of course.

John: No, not so much. Walking is hard; walking in those heels is hard.

Albert: Walking in heels is hard.

John: I also love the little improv- it wasn’t in the script, but I remember seeing it in the dalies - she cracks her neck.

Marc: Yes that was definite Parker move. And I know this had to be- the scene coming up had to be a John Rogers line, where it's written that Andre V is banging his head repeatedly against the wall.

[Laughter]

John: Well, yeah, because I do that in the writers room.

Marc: And they said, ‘We gotta move on.’ I said, ‘No, I need to get the guy banging his head.’

John: Trust me, have some sympathy. And this is where we pay off the idea that Tara has heard about this team, and now believes she's given Nate one clue as to what she’s gonna do and she's desperately hoping they're as good as they think they are, and she’s doing the set up to this, she's setting up this beat. It was tricky, because we did actually play- she does actually look like she's selling the team out here, and if you're watching the DVD, you are watching all the way through the seasons. aAnd we did go back and forth on how loyal would she be to the team. And it really is the fact that one of the reasons you watch the show, or at least I think one of the reasons you watch the show, is the family vibe.

Albert: Absolutely.

John: And just having somebody who wasn’t into the family vibe in the middle of it, it might've been interesting from a writing standpoint, and we’re all fans of the show who write the show, it wasn’t interesting from an audience standpoint; it felt a little overly clever, a little constructed. But we do it just enough that we can get she's part of the team, but she doesn't buy into Nate’s bullshit, and as a result her actions in the finale make some sort of organic sense. And the van, oh, the van.

Marc: Gotta have the van.

John: Not anymore.

[Laughter]

Marc: Well-

John: No the- and this, again, we had like four variations how this particular con worked. Who did those designs? Who did-? We have a lot of actual fashion designs floating around in this.

Marc: I think Nadine.

Albert: Nadine and her team did pretty much everything.

John: They sketched them up and sent them off to Derek to do the computer graphics.

Albert: They did the sketches, they did the buckles sketches, they designed the clothes. Like I said, this was a real- this was a field day for the wardrobe and makeup and hair.

Marc: For the glam department.

John: That was nice, too. Cause the thing we originally missed, that having him hand him the badge, it’s a nice touch. Again, the trick when you’re doing- Some of the endings we stop and explain a lot, some just kind of unroll, and you have to make sure you set up all the pieces. And a lot of times when you're running and gunning and shooting, that stuff goes away.

Marc: It does. And so much of it is like, you get to a certain scene like, oh my god, in the flashback you're supposed to see that happens later.

John: Do you break those off separately when you shoot these or-? I mean, I know you, kind of, barely read the script.

Marc: A lot of times they are within the scenes and god bless Suzanne, our script supervisor, she just, she-

John: She's the best. She's actually the best I've  ever worked with.

Marc: She's the gatekeeper, yeah, she’s amazing. 

John: A Script Supervisor’s job, in case you don't know, if you're watching, is to sit next to the Director with a copy of the script, with special notations that they go to school to learn, to track what is in every shot, what the angles are, what the sizes are, who’s crossing, who’s walking in from what direction.

Marc: She's basically- she's keeping score and she’s the directors best friend, or worst enemy.

John: You will hear a lot of directors, even really experienced directors say-

Marc: As well as an editor, because, you know, an editor just gets a hard drive of footage, and if he can't decipher her notes, then he's gonna struggle as well.

John: I've seen really experienced directors, guys who are famous, they will finish and will turn to their script supervisor and go ‘What do I need?’ Cause they're watching the coverage while the directors watching the-

Marc: And we do a lot of different things and as a director, you're watching performances, and you're making sure you're hitting all the right emotional beats, and you know, when we do certain scenes where we have multiple characters, or you’re doing a 360-

John: We have a five-hander here.

Marc: Yeah, or doing a 360 and the camera’s going around and around, you need someone to be keeping score for you.

John: I like the physicality, by the way, watching this again, of watching Tim does with his face when he’s with the character and when he's just dropped it, and all of a sudden that kind of fake character, the wardrobe doesn't matter if he's just pissed, and you know he's dug in.

Marc: As soon as he's pulled off the glasses-

John: It's Nate.

Marc: It's Nate. 

John: Great job.

Marc: And we haven't even had him say that, when Tom, later on, you know, points that out, you're not even who you say you are, he, like, looks at him in a certain way.

John: Yeah. No, nice call. The- oh yes, this was, again, interesting, is one of the things that really depends on the speed with which these guys can rip this stuff off. You know, in one of the original versions we were talking about where the dresses are actually transported- right after the fashion show, the dresses actually are driven across town and are put in a private closed viewing for the buyers. They won’t let anybody else close to those dresses because even with photographs, they can be knocked off within a matter of 48-72 hours. Which is stunning, which is what you're trying to fight when you're trying to fight piracy. And hung by his own sin, which is one of the rules.

Albert: There's always a rule. Yup. Going back to the wardrobe and hair and makeup departments, the other thing you don't end up seeing is that they went through a lot of their own iterations of what- before what you see on the screen. They did a lot of tests, they did a lot of different looks. If we had time, we could probably show all these other test photos they took, and different hair configurations, and make up, and at one point they did this whole sort of Kabuki look, but we decided that might've been a little too fashion forward for this show. They really went all out.

Marc: They went all out.

John: Did you say fashion forward?

Albert: Sure.

Marc: And some of them were just based on the element of time, you know, we wouldn't have time to change actors over to a certain style, and-

John: Yeah, cause I mean, that's the thing, is when the difference between shooting Parker as Parker, and shooting Parker as Parker as fashion model, is two hours to change that character's look.

Albert: At least.

John: At least. And the walk of victory.

Marc: Dun dun dunnn.

John: This is nice, this is- I, you know, I always love the 60s, 70s call back; it's a nice style choice. Also, you've got that great street to shoot down. Where was that? Was that outside of-?

Marc: That was right outside of the actual warehouse location.

Albert: Across the river.

Marc: Just across the river from downtown Portland, so it was really close; you know, had a nice overpass.

John: Looked like that section of T that’s elevated.

Marc: This, again, is supposed to be in Asia, which was actually just another area of the warehouse again.

John: And then that's a kind of an iconic shot for this show now. That's nice, the Jeri Ryan era, as the fans call it. If you go on the boards and see the fans arguing over which six episodes are the best in the giant ouvre of Leverage ouvre. And she pays a horrible horrible price for her treachery.

Albert: Those are real working steam presses, and I can tell you from having been there, they were ridiculously hot. 

[Laughter]

Albert: I didn't want to be anywhere near it. I was like, ‘Wow, Gloria is really a trooper going through this.’ She had to learn how to operate it; it had, like, foot petals and things.

John: This is why it's good to be a writer, is, we write horrible things and then the directors and actors go live there, while we occasionally- Sometimes we venture from the hotel room to go visit the set.

Marc: At times.

John: But it's for the best if the writer isn't there; just causes trouble.

Albert: We can go pose and take pictures with the models; that's when we show up on set.

John: Yes. And then this is actually based on, there's a bunch of factories now that are owned by the employees that were taken over. Some car factories, some- there was a big thing in South America for a while of the workers seizing foreclosed factories and opening them up as co-ops.

Marc: I did not know that.

John: Yes, there you go. Anything we can do to undermine the infrastructure of capitalism of America in Leverage we try to, we try to.

Marc: Now this is a happier factory, it's brighter.

John: Brighter colors.

Marc: Yeah, it's brighter colors, there's sound.

[Laughter]

John: I love that. I love you sitting in the director’s chair like, ‘Alright, now make it the happy sweatshop.’

Marc: How else can we make them happy?

John: Lunch breaks.

Marc: Lunch breaks! Sandwiches. Sandwiches make everyone happy. Everybody’s happy with a sandwich.

John: There you go, and milk, that's delicious. Look, and we saw that particular extra was unhappy earlier.

Albert: That's right.

Marc: She was.

John: There you go; really sold it. And again, it's interesting because, you know, you shot two years of this now, and you understand the vics aren't a big part of actual screen time, they are on in the opening, they're on in the closing. Those actors are insanely important, because it means you have to like them really fast, and if you don't like them really fast, you know, it won’t pay off.

Marc: Yeah, and they have to keep up because, you know, it's not like we get a lot of time to do rehearsals, and so some of the crux of the episode can be in their hands.

Albert: Oh yeah, the emotional core of the story always hinges on the victims and their choices.

John: And sometimes those scenes with Tim Hutton in the bar, that's the entire reason you're gonna care about this episode. And this is a lot of fun with- this is when we- again, we really track, if you watch the back six episodes where Tara Cole feels in how she's getting the money. Happy about getting the money, ambivalent about getting the money, not caring so much, you know. She never doesn't care, cause that's just wrong. And now, it's interesting, Tim and I had a nice conversation about this particular phone call, cause he called me about this and he's like, ‘I'm not sure where we're going with this.’ I'm like, ‘You know that moment when you've had an argument with the wife and you've realized you've said the wrong thing and you can never take it back?’ And he's like, ‘Oh yeah.’ and I'm like, ‘That one right there.’ And it's one of my favorite little Nate/Sophie scenes and they're not even in the same room. Because it's, you know, it's- banter is fun, relationships are hard.

Marc: Right.

Albert: Oh I like that. Banter is fun, relationships are hard. 

John: And, you know, end of day, unless you show a couple of these scenes every now and then, you don't buy these relationships as real. And that's why I think one of the reasons the Eliot/Nate relationship feels very grounded is, we give opportunity for Chris Kane and Tim to kind of dig in on the fact that they don't always agree, those characters.

Albert: And you gotta give somewhere for the characters to go. That's the thing about a scene like this, at the end it gives them somewhere to go after here.

John: That was great. Thank you so much, guys, that was a lot of fun. The episode was fantastic.

Albert: That was The Runway Job.

Marc: Thank you.

John: Anything you wanna say to the nice folks before we move onto the next one?

Marc: Stay tuned.

[Laughter]

John: It's a DVD, I don't think they’re gonna wander off-

Marc: For the season.

John: Oh for another season, that's right. Season 3. Albert anything you wanna say?

Albert: No this was great, this was, I think, my third episode working with Marc. Third, that I'd written. Kind of fourth.

John: Kind of codependent.

Marc: Yes, yes.

Albert: We are, but I've learned that one thing: banter is fun, but relationships are hard, so we gotta keep working on it.

Marc: That’s right.

[mountainviewhandymanremodeling]

Best Kitchen Remodeling Services and Cost in Mountain View , CA | Mountain View Best Handyman & Remodeling More information is at: https://besthandymanmountainview.com/kitchen-remodels-near-me/

Are you looking for the Best Kitchen Remodeling Services near Mountain View , CA? Mountain View Best Handyman & Remodeling, We use modern equipment along with tried-and-tested methods that allow us to remodel our clients’ homes and commercial spaces according to the highest standards and finish our tasks in a fast and efficient way. Cost? Best Kitchen Remodeling Services around Mountain View , CA We serve Mountain View , CA and other areas.

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KITCHEN REMODELS IN MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA

We love creating kitchens for our clients because it changes the way they enjoy their home!  Having the kitchen you always wanted is a big deal!

We want to help you think it through step by step. If the budget doesn’t allow you to create your dream kitchen in one shot, don’t compromise. It is possible to do it in phases.

Mountain View Best Handyman & Remodeling is often consulted by people for updating their kitchen and property companies who use us over and over.

But don’t go it alone! Let us help you walk through the steps that will make your dream a reality! What are your “must-haves”, your “most want’s”, and “could wait for later”?

DESIGN OVERVIEW Layout:  the floor plan, the island, and the flow. Infrastructure: framing, subfloor, windows, plumbing, and electrical Cabinets: quality, glides and hinges, and as many cabinets as you can afford Countertops: consider the impact on plumbing and electrical now Flooring: what’s going to work for you New appliances: now or later? Light fixtures: Easy to replace later but are important design elements in your new room Faucet: Upgrade-able but make sure the drill-out holes match the configuration of your future faucet Backsplash: Do you want a scrubbable semigloss or glass mosaic

COST Average Kitchen Remodel Cost

Kitchen Remodeling Services near Mountain View CA: On average, a kitchen remodel costs $25,167 or $150 per square foot. Most homeowners spend between $13,267 and $37,432 or $75 to $250 per square foot. The total expense varies depending on the size of the space, the quality of materials, and whether you change the layout of the room.

A smaller project between $10,000 and $15,000 may include painting walls, refacing cabinets, upgrading the sink, and installing a tile backsplash. A $30,000+ renovation may include installing custom cabinets, hardwood floors, granite counters, and high-end appliances.

The average cost to remodel a kitchen is $25,100 or $4,000 to $60,000.

The kitchen serves as the heart and hearth of your home. It’s where you prepare your meals and where all your parties gather. Is it any wonder that remodeling this space is so popular and has one of the largest payoffs in terms of boosting a property’s resale value? Of course, it’s also the most complicated and can be the most expensive.

National Average$25,167 Typical Range$13,267 – $37,432 Low End – High End$4,000 – $60,000

Kitchen Remodel Cost Estimator

a kitchen remodel costs $75 to $350 per square foot.

Kitchen remodels cost $75 to $250 per square foot. The first step in determining your estimate is looking at the space. Before you get to the smaller questions, ask yourself the big questions:

What do you want from the space? How do you want it to look and function? Is the size and configuration right? What should you spend? The industry says spend 5% to 15% of the home’s value on this project. If your house is worth $300,000, you could spend $30,000 without negatively affecting its resale price.

Consider some of these alternative options if you want to save money:

Reface or refinish your cabinets instead of replacing them. Refinishing your appliances costs about $200-$700. If your budget allows, consider replacing appliances to increase visual appeal and ROI. Replace things in stages rather than do everything at once.

Kitchen Renovation Budget Breakdown

Kitchen Remodeling Services near Mountain View CA: Kitchen renovations cost $12,500 to $34,0000, with a typical spend of around $23,000. The rate divides into materials, installation, lighting and plumbing fixtures.

Kitchen Makeover Design Costs

Kitchen Remodeling Services near Mountain View CA: Professional kitchen designers charge $100 to $200 per hour. Though the NKBA suggests four percent of your budget will go to design fees, this shoots up to closer to 10% when you hire a certified professional on-site. If you get advice or an in-home consultation from a materials and design store, it will certainly stay in the range of a $100 to $800 flat fee. However, homeowners report paying $3,500 to $18,500 for certified professionals and independent services. At this rate, you might expect such services as:

3D renderings Material and color selection Coordination with contractors and suppliers Start to finish support and management

Remodel Contractor Labor Rates

Expect to pay $3,500 to $6,000 for installation alone. Professional labor typically factors into the total in a range from 15% to 25%. The NKBA suggests 17% as the median. This percentage will vary depending on the size of the space and the features you install. Hiring a kitchen remodeling contractor is the best way to get the most out of your project and budget.

Cost to Renovate a Kitchen by Size

It could cost as little as $5,000 to remodel a small kitchen and as much as $60,000+ to do a large renovation. The size of your space will play a significant role in how expensive your renovation gets. Below, see the typical spend for various sizes and the factors involved.

Size (Square Feet) Average Cost Small (<70) $5,000-$20,000 Medium (100-150) $15,000-$40,000 Large (200+) $30,000-$60,000+

Small Kitchen Remodel Costs and Condo Renovations

The rate to update a small kitchen is between $5,000 and $20,000, depending on what you install, repair or upgrade. For this room, small is defined as 70 square feet or smaller. You’ll have limited options for a project of this size. It’s important to set your budget and plan for some DIY work to save time and money.

10×10 Kitchen Remodel Costs

Kitchen Remodeling Services near Wichita KS: A 100 square foot kitchen renovation costs $15,000 to $30,000. These dimensions qualify a space as “medium.”

Redo a 12×12 Space

Renovating a 12×12 kitchen runs between $20,000 and $40,000. This is close to the standard size, which is between 150 and 175 square feet.

Cost to Update a Large Kitchen

A large kitchen is defined as 200 feet or more and typically runs between $30,000 and $60,000. Upscale remodels can reach from $75,000 to $100,000 and beyond. With a large area like this, you may include features like:

Double oven Built-in appliances Commercial-style range Coffee or drink station Recycling station

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS. What types of cabinets do you offer with a kitchen renovation project?

We offer many wood options for cabinets, such as birch, cherry, maple, oak, and hickory, as well as different styles of cabinets raised panel, arched panel, and flat panel. Our kitchen design team can either build custom cabinets or install manufactured cabinets of all kinds, which are supplied by Aristokraft, Timberlake, Decora, Medallion, and Shrock.

How much does it cost to renovate a kitchen in Mountain View CA?

Are you planning for kitchen renovation in Mountain View CA? Do you have any idea about how much it cost to renovate a kitchen in Mountain View CA? At Mountain View Best Handyman & Remodeling, the average cost of kitchen renovation is $39, 515. Our major kitchen remodeling project generally covers the labor to replace the cabinets, countertop, electric and plumbing and new kitchen appliances.

How much does it cost to remodel a kitchen?

The average cost to remodel a kitchen in Mountain View CA is $39, 515. At Mountain View Best Handyman & Remodeling Design & Remodeling, our Wichita KS kitchen renovation project covers the installation of kitchen fixtures, appliances, electrical works, etc. For more details, please call us now on 212.666.2888

How long will a kitchen project take starting from the day the demolition begins?

This depends on the exact scope but it usually takes 4-6 weeks to complete the work at the apartment. Read more

What is your warranty for labor and materials?

We offer 5 years limited warranty on the labor we perform and the materials we supply. Do not hire a contractor who does not warranty his work or the materials he uses.

How long does a kitchen renovation project take to complete?

Most kitchen projects take between one and three weeks to complete. Your home remodel may be longer or shorter depending on the number and scope of the kitchen design ideas we implement. One of our design specialists can estimate how long your specific project should take.

What type of kitchen countertop should I choose?

There are many different options available when it comes to countertops, including granite, quartz, solid surface, laminate, and others. We want you to have the exact kitchen you desire, so our team will help you find the counter top that is right for you.

I want to remodel my kitchen, but I’m not quite sure what I want. Can you help?

Yes. Our experienced contractors can help design a kitchen that is both attractive and practical. The room should meet the specific needs of your family, and we will help you achieve that.

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[architectnews]

"Taking credit for trees planted elsewhere is a whole lot of embodied irony"

Architecture firm Perkins&Will has gone too far with claims that a luxury timber home on a Canadian mountain removes more atmospheric carbon than it emits, argues Fred A Bernstein.

For much of last winter, Perkins&Will, an architecture firm with 25 offices from San Francisco to Singapore to Sao Paulo, used a photo of a wooden house in British Columbia as one of the "hero images" on its website.

The house, which sits alone on a mountaintop overlooking the Soo Valley 90 miles north of Vancouver, is certainly beautiful, but the firm had other reasons for splashing it across its homepage. The 321-square-metre dwelling, known as the SoLo House, is meant to be a model of sustainability.

Entirely off the grid, it is designed to operate with power from 103 solar panels on its south facade, a 96-kilowatt-hour battery pack to store electricity for nights and cloudy days (both of which are frequent in British Columbia), and a hydrogen fuel cell for winter.

With all that equipment, the house may well be able to function without utility hook-ups. But Perkins&Will has made a far more surprising and audacious claim: that the building's structure is "beyond carbon neutral," meaning that it will remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emitted in the first place.

It seemed to be giving its clients permission to build willy-nilly at a time of climate crisis

In a slickly produced video on the firm's website, Perkins&Will architect Alysia Baldwin says the house "proves that buildings can counteract their negative consequences and act as a source of repair."

People listen to Perkins&Will, a firm that has positioned itself as a leader in green building. "For nearly a quarter of a century, we've been at the vanguard of the sustainability movement," its website declares. Journalists have tended to repeat its claims.

But this time it had gone too far. By constructing a showplace of a house on an otherwise pristine mountaintop, and claiming it had helped the environment by doing so, it seemed to be giving its clients permission to build willy-nilly at a time of climate crisis.

Looking at SoLo House, with its cathedral ceilings, its comfortable sectional sofas and its giant picture windows, then listening to Perkins&Will claim that its structure reduces atmospheric carbon, I'm reminded of the old punchline: "Who are you going to believe – me, or your lying eyes?"

Reducing a building's contribution to atmospheric carbon means making it small, keeping it simple, building it near existing infrastructure, avoiding the need for heavy equipment such as batteries and fuel cells and using the lowest-embodied-energy building materials.

Reducing a building's contribution to atmospheric carbon means making it small

Perkins&Will, normally an excellent firm, has done those things on other projects. But with SoLo House, it seems not to have even tried.

According to experts, 40 per cent of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from buildings. Some emissions are attributable to running appliances and systems – so-called operational energy. The rest comes from the power needed to produce the building in the first place, known as embodied energy.

Incredibly, Perkins&Will is claiming there is "no embodied energy" in the house's structure (by which it means the elements that keep the building standing). To its credit, the firm answered requests for information promptly, providing facts, figures and charts prepared by Baldwin and her colleague Cillian Collins, a senior architect.

Here's how Baldwin and Collins arrived at their no-embodied-energy claim: First they estimated the amount of structural wood, steel and concrete in SoLo House. And then they turned to Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, an app that approximates the amount of energy needed to produce given amounts of each building material and the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere as a result of that energy use.

Athena told them that producing the steel and concrete, harvesting the wood and so on in SoLo House released 122 tonnes of CO2 (sometimes called CO2e, for CO2 and its equivalents) into the atmosphere.

That should have been the beginning – not the end – of the process of calculating the building's embodied energy. There are hundreds of other items that needed to be counted. Start with the roof. The walls. The windows (a massive item, given the need for triple glazing). The solar panels, the batteries, the hydrogen fuel cells. The furniture. The appliances. The plumbing. The heating and cooling systems. Lots and lots of insulation.

The list goes on. Each of those items has significant embodied energy. Transporting all of those materials to a remote mountaintop site adds more.

Perkins&Will failed to account for those sources of embodied energy. Baldwin was clear, in a letter to me, that the calculations were limited to the structure. But why would anyone stop there? According to Baldwin, it's because structure "represents the largest contribution to a typical building's embodied carbon impacts."

It may also be because Athena only applies to structure. (Athena is meant primarily for comparing how the choice of a structural material affects a building's embodied energy. An architect might enter plans for the same building, once with a concrete frame and once with a steel frame, and see how the embodied carbon figures differ.)

Of course, there are other ways to estimate the house's total embodied energy; one method is to use an online tool called Tally, which provides information on the embodied energy of numerous building components. Counting everything isn't easy, but other firms have done it.

Perkins&Will had a way of making it vanish, if not from the atmosphere then from the balance sheet

Even so, according to Athena, the house emitted 122 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. That sounds like a lot of carbon, but Perkins&Will had a way of making it vanish, if not from the atmosphere then from the balance sheet.

Much of SoLo House is made of wood. Wood, like all plants, is produced by photosynthesis from ingredients that include carbon dioxide. Thus trees are said to store (or sequester) carbon. They do, but probably not as much as people think, as I learned by studying the question at length.

Here's Perkins&Will's theory: If you cut down a tree and use the wood as a building material, that carbon sequestered in that tree becomes part of the building. Then, if you plant a new tree in place of the one you cut down, the new tree will sequester additional carbon as it grows. Thus the process (cutting down one tree, planting another) results, net-net, in carbon being removed from the atmosphere.

There are so many problems with that theory it's hard to know where to begin. To name a few:

1) You have to be sure a new tree will be planted in place of the one you cut down; will get to be as big as the one you cut down; and will live a long, healthy life. (If a tree burns, or decomposes, as billions of trees do every year, its embodied carbon is released right into the atmosphere.)

2) You can't waste any of the wood. That's a problem because converting a tree into lumber usually turns half the wood into sawdust or chips, which could end up being burnt or allowed to decompose. This problem alone suggests carbon sequestration figures should be cut in half.

3) The wood has to stay in or on the building for a very long time. If the building needs repairs, and lumber is removed, it may be recycled, but it may also be burnt or allowed to decompose. And who'll be watching in 20 or 50 years?

4) Let's be honest: You could have planted the new tree somewhere else, and not cut down the first tree to begin with. For that reason, no number of trees excuses a wasteful building.

5) Even if the new trees do sequester carbon, the process will take decades. Scientists who study global warming warn of tipping points and thresholds, some of which could be reached within the next ten years. If new buildings help push atmospheric carbon levels to a point of no return, the sequestration accomplished by newly planted trees will be too little, too late.

6) It's a logical impossibility. If you really believe SoLo House repairs the atmosphere, all you have to do is build enough SoLo Houses and climate change will go away. Now for our next trick ...

No number of trees excuses a wasteful building

No wonder the theory is highly controversial. A whole lot of things have to happen just right for it to become a reality. As Baldwin wrote in an email: "We acknowledge that not all timber sources perform equally in the realm of embodied carbon reduction."

"Much of the embodied carbon reduction achieved by timber is directly attributed to sustainable forestry management practices that ensure forestry operations are carried out in a way that allows forests to remain healthy and viable for future generations," she added. "These practices include conservation and protection, land use planning, regulation of timber harvesting, establishing practices to ensure forest regrow, and continuous monitoring and reporting to government."

She went on to admit that the tool used to determine the building's sequestered carbon, WoodWorks Carbon Calculator, a product of the Washington-based Wood Products Council, considers "much of this storage to be temporary and therefore [does] not give the building a carbon credit for the carbon dioxide that will eventually be released from this wood some time down the road, through decay or incineration."

But that didn't stop the firm from banking on the theory when it performed its embodied energy calculation. Using the Carbon Calculator, it determined that the amount of lumber in the building would result in the removal – through the planting of new trees – of 145 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. That's a bit more than the 122 tonnes the firm says the building's timber, concrete, and steel released into the atmosphere.

Converting a tree into lumber usually turns half the wood into sawdust or chips

So in this case, reducing E (embodied carbon) by S (sequestered carbon) produces a negative number – minus 22 tonnes, meaning that building the house decreased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. (Indeed, the house's owner, Delta Land Development, refers to it as "climate positive.")

Perkins & Will firm produced a chart to make this clear:

As Baldwin puts it, SoLo House "is able to store more carbon in its structure than was released during the production, manufacturing, and construction of the project."

That's a highly suspect statement. Based on everything I've learned, E (embodied energy) may be much greater than Perkins&Will says it is, and S (sequestered carbon) much lower.

In a letter responding to points in this article prior to publication, Perkins&Will wrote the following (the client, Delta Land Development, did not respond to requests for comment):

"Through careful selection of low embodied carbon and locally sourced materials, the project prioritized a mass timber structure. The design team used industry-accepted LCA [life cycle assessment] tools to quantify the carbon sequestration potential of the structure, and the timber structure is modelled to sequester 145 tonnes of CO2e as biogenic carbon."

Reusing/recycling is always the greenest strategy

"Structural elements typically represent the largest embodied carbon profile of [a] project, and as such, the structure was prioritized from an embodied carbon perspective."

"As designers, we rely on reputable industry tools to estimate the impact of projects. We used the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings to complete this assessment. Athena uses ongoing research by the Athena Institute and complies with ISO 14040 (environmental management, life cycle assessment, and principles and framework) and ISO 14044 (environmental management, life cycle assessment, and requirements and guidelines)."

"Per our previous correspondence, we shared the Athena Institute's definition of biogenic sequestered carbon, which considers the whole life cycle of the material, including extraction, manufacturing, forms of transportation, installation, repair and maintenance, and end of life (assuming reuse of the wood)."

However, if Perkins and Will had really wanted to reduce embodied carbon, it would have thought about some of these strategies:

1) Putting the house in an easily accessible location, thus cutting out hundreds or thousands of trips by delivery people and construction workers. (Perkins&Will points out "that the wood was sourced from within British Columbia, and the building panels were manufactured in Pemberton, BC, which is located 30 minutes from the site.")

2) Renovating an existing house. Reusing/recycling is always the greenest strategy. Renovation typically generates 50 to 75 per cent less atmospheric carbon than new construction.

3) Choosing a site where there are no trees to cut down. According to Perkins&Will, "A clearing was required for a driveway, solar access, and fire protection. It required harvesting 180m³ of second-growth hemlock timber. This wood was put into the BC forestry chain, becoming useful lumber." Taking credit for sequestration by trees that may have been planted elsewhere, while cutting down enough trees on site to fill a five-meter by six-meter by six-meter container, is a whole lot of embodied irony.

4) Making the house a lot smaller. When it comes to saving energy, less is definitely more.

5) Choosing versions of steel and concrete with the lowest embodied energy (a lot of research is being done on ways of making those materials less "carbon-intensive").

Perkins&Will appears not to have done these things — the actual work required to reduce carbon emissions. The danger is that people will believe its claims.

Fred A Bernstein studied architecture at Princeton and law at NYU and writes about both subjects. He has published articles about embodied energy – a significant component of the climate crisis – in Oculus (a primer), in Architect Magazine (an admonition to architecture critics) and in the Architect's Newspaper (a warning that efforts to make buildings resilient are often detrimental from an embodied energy standpoint).

Carbon revolution

This article is part of Dezeen's carbon revolution series, which explores how this miracle material could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on earth. Read all the content at: www.dezeen.com/carbon.

The sky photograph used in the carbon revolution graphic is by Taylor van Riper via Unsplash.

The post "Taking credit for trees planted elsewhere is a whole lot of embodied irony" appeared first on Dezeen.

[educationtech]

100 Days Of Code — A lot more than just code | Arya College

A successful software developer can get into the big company by making some preparations and cover different topics. Make a plan, try to follow your plan and start doing preparation through various resources, tutorials, and videos. Once you start learning, you realized that you are not going anywhere or making any progress. It happens with many newbie programmers or experienced developers of Top Engineering Colleges in India.

They try to learn to code, and cover various topics but due to the lack of a good roadmap and guidance, things become messy and confusing for them. During their preparation, they miss out on a lot of necessary things to cover. To overcome this, students can follow the practical roadmap of “100 days of code” based on a lot of research and the experience of software developers working in big tech companies. This roadmap will provide a complete guideline to build a strong coding habit and to achieve your goal as a software developer.

Students of MTech colleges just need a laptop, a working internet connection, determination to solve problems regularly and within a few months, they can develop the coding habit, learn the essentials, and crack the interviews.

What is 100 Days of Code?

There are a lot of topics and things to cover if students of engineering colleges are targeting some big tech companies. The challenge is the limited time frame and based on our research, it may take almost 14 weeks or 100 Days. We have divided the complete topics into 100 days and all they just have to do is to follow it and stay committed to coding for 100 days.

If students of Engg colleges follow this approach and stay committed to coding, it helps you develop a good coding habit but crack the interviews of 60-70% of tech companies. In 100 days, graduates can cover 5-6 main topics and target the interviews of big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. These topics includes Data Structures and Algorithms (Coding part and problem solving), Operating System and DBMS (database management system), System Design, Object-Oriented Design, Cultural Fit, etc.

It is important to consider several factors while continuing the roadmap like:

A beginner can target to solve almost 450-500 coding questions.

An experienced person can target to solve almost 300 to 350 questions.

System design round is mostly asked from experienced coders, so beginners must focus less on this section but experienced has to focus on this section more.

A beginner can commit your time for at least 4-6 hours every day.

An experienced one need to commit for 2-3 hours every day.

Ideally, you shouldn’t take more than 20–30 minutes to solve any given problem but remember that it is not applicable to all the questions.

100 Days of Code for Beginners

A newbie programmer will be overwhelmed with so many questions and students of Best Engineering Colleges will face a lot of difficulty in solving the problems. It is okay if they take more time in solving the questions but don’t be discouraged. Try to solve the problems on your own, even if it takes a lots of time. After spending many hours, if an individual does not get the solution then, they can stretch themselves for a few days or take the hints.

1. Day 1 to Day 10Choose a Programming Language and Learn the Basics

Choose a programming language and students of top MTech colleges need to be stick with it. Explore different programming languages, read about them, try it out in your code editor, and check if they are comfortable with it or not.

C++ is a faster language while Java syntax is more complicated but big companies are working on it. It will almost take 4-5 days in picking up a language. While choosing a language, learn the fundamentals and brush up on it. Learn the basic syntax, provide some online tests, and remember the basic things of their chosen language. It may take around one week or 7 days to learn the basics of a language.

2. Day 11 to Day 20Learn Data Structures and Algorithms

Learn the essential part of the coding i.e., Data Structures and Algorithms. This subject is mostly taught in undergrad and most students of engineering colleges ignore the importance of it. But the topic in this subject is the most important thing to cover in the coding interviews.

3. Day 21 to Day 40Solve Basic Level Problems

Once you get familiar with the basic algorithm and data structure, practice for the basic coding questions. Practicing basic level questions will help stretch your mind and it will prepare you to tackle medium level problems. Do not skip the basic level, otherwise they will face difficulty in solving harder problems and they will have to go back to the basic level again. Try to solve almost 200 basic level questions within the period of 10 days.

4. Day 41 to Day 60Solve Medium Level Problems

Practise for some medium level questions and get prepared to solve harder problems and these questions are most likely asked in the interviews. Try to solve almost 150-170 medium level questions within the period of 20 days.

5. Day 61 to Day 75Solve Hard Level Problems

Once an individual solves the basic and medium level question, they can move to the hard problems. Try to solve almost 80-90 hard level questions within the period of 15 days. You can increase the number of questions as per the time and speed.

6. Day 76 to Day 85System Design

Learn the basic concept of system design like Load Balancing, Caching, Proxies, CAP Theorem, Consistency, Sharding or data partitioning, etc. students of engineering colleges in Jaipur will be asked to design a web-scale service. Prepare yourself for some most likely system design round questions such as URL Shortening Service (TinyURL), /Design Facebook Newsfeed, Design Uber or Lyft.

7. Day 86 to Day 92OS and DBMS

Study the two most important computer science subjects, operating systems, and database management systems. Most of the time junior engineers of engineering colleges in India struggle with the OS and DBMS related questions and skip this part. But preparing these two subjects are also important for the interviews.

8. Day 93 to Day 99Object-Oriented Design

Prepare yourself for an object-oriented design question for 7 days. An individual should have a good understanding of software design patterns, SOLID/DRY principles, and various oops concepts. Some object-oriented design questions include Design an ATM, Design Vending Machine, design a Parking Lot, Design a Movie Ticket Booking System, etc.

9. Day 100Cultural Fit

Prepare yourself for the cultural round. Companies do not hire toxic people and also, they do not hire candidates of engineering colleges, which are not passionate about the product. Understand the culture of the company. In interviews, they will have to show interest in the product and they will have to be honest.

Thanks for Read our blog, you can check out full blog on official Page Arya College, Arya College is one of the Best Engineering College In Jaipur Rajasthan. In This College Many Branches for Engineering you can make great future with us. Arya College Provides Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering & Electronics Engineering’s Branch for our Engineering students with top companies placements in campus.

[whichmortgage]

What's the point in an electric bike? After riding one for a few weeks, I think they are the best chance of getting us out of our cars, says SIMON LAMBERT

As I sailed past the bloke on a racing bike, I felt slightly guilty. I was heading uphill on a folding bike with BMX-sized wheels and barely breaking a sweat, meanwhile my lycra-clad fellow cyclist was puffing away to travel at a far slower pace. To ease my conscience, I gently let go of the button I’d been pressing to give me a turbo boost up the hill and went back to just the standard level of assistance the electric bike was giving me. This was in pre-lockdown days and I was commuting across London to work on GoCycle’s GX – a folding electric bike that over a few weeks managed to radically change my thoughts on battery-assisted pedalling. Until March, on average, I had cycled the eight miles from my home in North London to the This is Money offices in Kensington High Street, at least four out of the five days a week I went there, all-year round, for the last 14 years. I love riding a bike. Living in London and riding to work, it was a mode of transport that was more pleasurable than the tube. In my leisure time, I do it for fun. But I’m not that serious about it. I own no lycra, I’ve never been on a club ride and I do not have the Strava app on my phone. I’d also rather drop a couple of grand on an old car than a very expensive bike. Like many more serious-minded cyclists than me, however, I was of the opinion that if you’re going to ride a bike then you should do it under your own steam - and couldn’t quite see the point of choosing a heavy, expensive electric bicycle over a normal one. Nonetheless, when GoCycle asked if I fancied trying out one of their electric bikes over a few weeks, I thought why not. I imagined that I’d use it a few times to see what it was like and then stash it away somewhere until it was time to return it - going back to riding my normal bike in the meantime. That couldn’t have been further from what happened. I absolutely loved riding that electric folding bike and pretty much used it every day. I ended up borrowing it for longer than originally planned, and even took it up to Centre Parcs, in Suffolk, travelling there after work by a combination of train and bike. After three weeks of riding it, I was genuinely sad to give it back. So, what did I love about it and why do I think electric bikes could make a huge difference to the way we get about? Firstly, it’s worth noting that a GoCycle GX should be good, because it costs £2,899. That’s a lot of money. You can buy a decent car for that, including a bargain classic that probably won't lose money. However, it is also worth noting there are quite a few serious cyclists out there who wouldn’t consider the price tag that expensive for a good bike. Yet, they would also probably look at a GX and think that they won’t get much enjoyment out of riding that. It’s a folding bike, hinging in the middle, and while it looks considerably more space age than a Brompton, it’s got that gawky long saddle post and handle bar thing going on, which doesn’t shout nimble ride. And yet, somehow, the GX handles exceptionally well and is good fun to ride. A clue to why comes from the company founder Richard Thorpe, who left a design job at McLaren Cars to start-up the e-bike firm. The GX sacrifices some of the compactness of a Brompton, with 20 inch rather than 16 inch wheels, and a bulkier frame meaning that it doesn’t fold up as small. But design elements - incuding a deliberately longer wheelbase - mean it rides much better and is just as practical. You genuinely can fold it in ten seconds, releasing one clip allowing the frame to hinge and another the handlebar stem, and then attach a small rubber strap to hold it in place. You then flip it back and wheel it along using the saddle. Put it in a train carriage and it takes up not much more room than a Brompton, and the extra space is mainly above it where nothing would be anyway. It weighs 17.4 kilograms, enough to make your serious road cyclist wince, but that's only about 3kg more than my mountain bike - and so not that heavy. Plus, you've got that 250 watt electric motor helping you along, while the easiest way to move it about is to wheel it, and it's not too heavy to pick up to get through a door or onto a train. Out on the road, the bike can be set to give you three different levels of assistance up to 15.5mph, but you must be pedalling for the power to kick in, you cannot just use the throttle to move only on electric power. That top speed for assistance and no throttle-only riding are the law for electric bikes in the UK. All GX bikes can actually run in electric mode up to 20mph, but when you register it as a UK bike that's digitally downgraded to our 15.5mph. Folding electric bike alternatives Brompton sells an electric version of its hugely popular folding bikes, with range of up to 45 miles. The Brompton Electric costs from £2,595, whereas a standard Brompton costs from £900. Decathalon sells its B'Twin Tilt 500 electric folding bike for £749. Range is up to 22 miles. Halfords sells the Carrera Crosscity folding electric bike for £999, with range of up to 30 miles. Raleigh's Evo electric folding bike has a range of up to 30 miles and 20 inch wheels and costs £1,350. There are three gears on the bike and its a decent system, although I felt I could have done with a bit further for the gearing to go when riding flat out. There is a button that boosts the assistance, as I referred to at the start of this column, and you can go faster than 15.5mph if you want under your own pedal power. The range is up to 40 miles on a charge, which takes 7 hours or 4 hours with a fast charger. I found that even using it for 16 miles a day of battery-assisted cycling, I only needed to charge once or twice during the working week. The experience is like riding along with a strong wind at your back, or being a kid with your mum or dad riding alongside with their arm behind, helping you along. You’re still cycling, it’s just a lot easier. And this is where I think e-bikes could be a game-changer. They are unlikely ever to get the serious cyclists to swap to them, but that’s not the point. The e-bike is better suited to those who wouldn’t otherwise cycle – whether because they feel the journey is too long or hard, the hill is too steep, or they can’t turn up hot and sweaty. An electric bike removes those problems. If you get a folding one, whether at the top-end from GoCycle or considerably cheaper from some other manufacturers, including Decathalon’s £750 bike, it can remove the need to drive to work or the station, get on a packed tube, or even use public transport at all. At the same time, you have the flexibility to bung it in the car boot or take it on the train if you need. One of the good things about lockdown is that it has got people out of their cars and out walking and on their bikes. I'm no longer in London - we had sold our flat and moved before lockdown began - but I've never seen this many people out on bikes on the roads and country lanes in Hertfordshire, where I've moved back to where I grew up. Friends in London tell me it's the same in the capital and bike shops around Britain are reporting booming business. It would be great if we could continue that once life returns to whatever normal will be. Combine electric bikes with some newfound confidence from Britain getting back on its bike while the roads were quiet and we could have potent combination. A standard electric bike could easily replace the short regular car journeys that you do - and there is something about that assistance that means you are much more likely to decide it won't be a hassle going on two wheels and use it instead of the car. A folding electric bike - like any folding bike - is a compromise, but as I found with the GX they can be seriously good and a very handy companion for the commuter. You are still doing exercise too, so it's good for you, just with a bit less effort than you would with a normal bike - and you can always turn off the assistance to work out properly. What's lost in the electric assistance may even be gained overall, as people are more likely to get out on their bike and do some exercise. Meanwhile, if your employer does a cycle to work scheme, you can save up to 40 per cent of the purchase price with a tax break, as we explain here. The Cycle to Work Scheme allows you to buy a bike via your employer and then pay for it via salary sacrifice, saving on your tax bill. The purchase price limit was previously £1,000, but the latest government guidance lifted this for employers who agree to go higher. Is it too great a leap of imagination for the authorities to buy strips of land through the fields, to link villages and towns with direct, safe, off-road cycling and walking routes? We also need councils and the government to play their part. Off-road routes needed to be stepped up a gear in urban areas. But too often the focus is all on that and not on linking up villages and towns, where a huge amount of day-to-day car journeys could be replaced. Is it too great a leap of imagination for the authorities to buy strips of land through the fields, to link villages and towns with direct, safe, off-road cycling and walking routes? That would make a great green transport infrastructure push for the coronavirus recovery. An electric bike is possibly the best alternative to a car for many people making journeys of up to 10 miles. We should seize the moment and encourage the switch. Click here to view original web page at www.dailymail.co.uk Read the full article

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How the Keto Diet Became Palatable

New Post has been published on https://bestrawfoodrecipes.com/how-the-keto-diet-became-palatable/

How the Keto Diet Became Palatable

It was 2017, and Neil Thompson’s friend was about to be kicked out of the military for being overweight. Spurred into action, his friend announced that he was going on a diet and started to lose weight – and fast. Very fast. “In 20 days, he’d lost almost 10kg,” recalls Thompson, who works in IT for the navy. “So, I asked him, ‘How did you do it?’”

His friend explained that, while browsing online for a quick weight-loss plan, he had stumbled upon a Reddit thread about something called the “ketogenic diet”. People on the 1.4 million-strong r/keto subreddit posted about losing 25kg in a couple of months, while never feeling hungry and finding it easier to focus during their working days. However, the diet was, to put it mildly, contrarian in the same way that Brexit is “divisive”.

First, you almost completely eliminate carbohydrates. Low-carb diets are no longer considered radical – the macronutrient has steadily been falling out of nutritional favour for at least a couple of decades – but keto typically advocates an intake of less than 40g per day. (For context, most of us will hit that at breakfast.) Fruit is largely frowned upon, and there’s a strict cap on veg. Yes: fresh, wholesome vegetables.

If you assume that you’ll make up for those lost calories with generous servings of lean chicken, or copious whey shakes, you’re wrong. Next, you’re limited to about 100g of protein per day, though ideally less. What’s left? Lots of fat: marbled steak, oily fish, egg yolk, streaky bacon. Top it all with butter, olive oil or lard, then a scoop of smashed avocado. A classic keto diet provides 90 per cent of your daily calories from fat, 6 per cent from protein and 4 per cent from carbs. In short, it’s a giant middle finger raised at Public Health England’s “Eatwell Plate”.

But Thompson’s friend told him that the ketogenic diet, while bizarre, was rooted in science. The absence of carbs and the abundance of fat push your body into a metabolic state called ketosis, during which you burn fat instead of glucose. The 5ft 9in Thompson – who was, by his own admission, “a bit portly” at 90kg – was intrigued. His online digging led him to a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan, an American UFC commentator, comedian and self-described “silly bitch”, is well known for unpretentiously unpacking complex topics. In one episode, he interviewed top keto researcher Dom D’Agostino, a professor of physiology at the University of South Florida.

“It was interesting to hear a scientist talk about what he eats and why,” says Thompson. D’Agostino is not a salesman, and he did not create the diet (of which more later). But Thompson didn’t care about keto’s history. He just wanted to know if there was any substance to the hype. “I threw out all of my carb-heavy foods,” he says. “Then, I picked up as much bacon, grass-fed butter and steak as I could afford.”

Fact to Fad

If you’re like most fitness-minded people, you’ve probably dabbled with trendy eating plans at least once. But what makes a fad diet tip? That’s a question that Adrienne Rose Bitar, a nutrition historian at Cornell University, has spent her career answering. “Most diets start with some unhappiness we have with our lives and bodies,” she says. This makes us susceptible to simple, counter-intuitive messages that blame our dissatisfaction on a single culprit. Low-fat diet: fat is bad, so don’t eat it. Paleo: processed foods are bad, so stick to the kind of “pre-industrial” food that your ancestors ate.

With keto, you do exactly what your doctor (and likely mother) told you not to

With keto, you do exactly what your doctor (and likely mother) told you not to: eat the delicious, fatty foods and skip the vegetables. While this might partly explain keto’s rise in popularity, it overlooks a crucial aspect of the story. The keto diet, it turns out, was not developed to aid weight loss. It was designed for epileptics.

Fasting has been used as a treatment for epilepsy since at least 500BC. Your body usually runs on sugars harvested from the carbs you eat. You store around 2,000kcal worth of sugars in your liver and muscles. Your body burns through that in about 48 hours, which is when an evolutionary survival mechanism kicks in. Your body switches to its stored fat, some of which is converted to a fuel called ketones. This state is called ketosis (defined as registering 0.5 to three millimoles of ketones per litre of blood).

In the 1920s, Mayo Clinic doctor Russell Wilder started tinkering with a fat-centric diet that mimicked the effects of fasting by depleting the body of sugar. He tested his “ketogenic” diet on people with epilepsy and, ever since, it has been an effective treatment for seizures.

Weight loss entered the frame in 1972, when cardiologist Robert Atkins published his first diet book. The initial weeks of his eponymous diet plan centred on eating fat and very little carbs to induce ketosis, a “happy state… [in which] your fat is being burned off with maximum efficiency and minimum deprivation”. That was when keto first appeared on the radar of Stephen Phinney, an MIT-trained biochemist, who began researching its potential applications for endurance sports.

Then, in 1976, the “Last Chance Diet” took off. How it works is exceedingly simple: you drink a fat- and protein-rich concoction until you shed your desired amount of weight. The diet, created by osteopath Robert Linn, quickly spawned a lucrative industry, with £30m of the elixir sold in less than two years. You were supposed to consult a physician, who would ensure that you were getting the necessary vitamins and minerals – but most people didn’t bother.

Your body can survive for a long time in a carb deficit, but it requires micronutrients. Robbed of minerals, it can’t perform certain crucial functions, like sending electrical impulses to your heart. Between July 1977 and January 1978, the US Food and Drug Administration received more than 60 reports of deaths among “liquid protein” users. The fallout included new regulations, and a negligence lawsuit for Linn. As for Phinney, he and his research on ketosis were, in effect, banished to academic Siberia.

Still, Phinney forged on, conducting studies that, for example, showed that liquid ketogenic diets with adequate nutrients wouldn’t cause heart problems. In 1988, Optifast emerged. Like Last Chance, it was a liquid diet, but with sufficient vitamins and minerals, plus a celebrity enthusiast in Oprah Winfrey. “She did it for four months,” says Phinney. “One day, she opened her show pulling a red wagon that contained 30kg of pig and beef fat. And she points to it and says, ‘That’s how much weight I’ve lost.’” Optifast immediately received more than 200,000 inquiries, and keto research surged in the early 1990s.

It was at this point that the diet was adopted by the hard-core bodybuilding underground, evolving into the version you know today. “I first heard about keto from this guy named Dan Duchaine,” says D’Agostino, a name cited by several other nutrition researchers interviewed for this story. (Duchaine, who died in 2000, was a two-time felon credited with promoting the steroid movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and reviving keto as a way for bodybuilders to drop fat quickly for competition.) Then, with the rediscovery of the Atkins diet in the 2000s, new generations – and perhaps you – warmed to the idea that low-carb could be a dietary tool.

THE VOORHES

Early Adopters

The scaling up of keto started with a study published by a San Francisco-based research centre in 2013. Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes found that a ketone, produced when you limit calories or carbs, can activate powerful anti-ageing genes. This keto diet, as the press release put it, “may one day allow scientists to better treat or prevent age-related disease, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s and many forms of cancer”. Nutritionally woke bio-hackers – interested in keto for fat loss, athletic performance, productivity and longevity in equal parts – began to self-experiment.

Among them was Tim Ferriss, the Princeton-educated, Silicon Valley-based podcaster and author. He’d dabbled in keto, writing that it’s “incredible for simultaneous fat loss and lean muscle gain, though perhaps needlessly complicated for non-athletes”. In 2013, he posted a video of Peter Attia, a longevity expert. In it, Attia talks about his battle with metabolic syndrome and how keto changed his health in ways that the conventional avenues of exercise and a vegetable-rich diet could not; he uses graph after graph to plot the positive impact on his triglycerides and blood glucose.

This sort of dietary evangelism is not without precedent. Diets have traditionally been religious: halal, kosher, Lent. As Bitar puts it: “Many diets were actually plans to purify the soul.” Now, in place of dogma we have data. But the sentiment is very similar: the right diet can make you not just trimmer but better. Following Ferriss’s endorsement, the number of people searching for the keto diet immediately doubled and continued to trend upward as other lifestyle gurus, such as Dave Asprey and Mark Sisson, jumped aboard.

Keto’s side benefits – a reduced desire to eat and increased focus – appealed to productivity-fixated, bio-hacker bros. “Keto does control hunger,” says Guyenet. The reason, he says, may be the extreme nature of the diet. “Carbs and fat together stimulate dopamine release and activate motivational circuits in the brain that drive us to eat,” he says. Consider ice cream: you find it so appetising because it’s both sweet and fatty. As for your promised mental clarity? This remains controversial. Any effect is probably due to eating less junk food, which can cause your blood sugar to rise and dip, impacting energy and mood.

As keto’s popularity continues to increase, the medical establishment has cautioned that – although the diet is considered safe when done correctly – the emphasis on saturated fat and the lack of micronutrients may affect your heart health over time. “We still don’t have enough long-term evidence on what happens to your body after 10 years of ketosis,” says nutrition researcher Stephan Guyenet. And an effective diet should be for life, not just for the summer.

Still, as the buzz around keto intensified, the claims became grander and more outlandish. In November 2015, Ferriss aired a podcast with D’Agostino. That was the tipping point, “the moment at which the diet entered the vernacular and zeitgeist”, says Andy Galpin, a performance researcher at California State University, Fullerton.

The episode’s rather hubristic title was “Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer”. Ferriss told the story of a friend with testicular cancer who would fast for three days to enter into ketosis before chemotherapy. D’Agostino noted that anyone with cancer needs medical supervision of their diet, but also said: “If you put your physiology into a state of fasting ketosis, that puts tremendous metabolic stress on cancer cells that are highly dependent for survival and growth on high levels of glucose and insulin. By subtracting them of those growth needs, they can [die], and you could potentially purge yourself of some precancerous cells.”

When asked about that statement, D’Agostino concedes, “This episode’s title is unfortunate,” but he points out that his research does suggest keto can help slow the progression of some cancers, though it speeds up others. “It’s much more complicated than ‘starve your cancer of sugar’,” he says. (Ferriss declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The Ferriss podcast was a gateway to The Joe Rogan Experience, and soon Rogan’s 30 million monthly listeners were learning about the “new” diet. As keto spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the US, the emphasis shifted from self-optimisation to a key concern of the everyman working 40-hour weeks: weight loss.

No Dead Weight

Keto thrives on social media, in part because its swift results are so photogenic: you’ve likely seen the before-and-after shots on Instagram. “Short-term carb restriction can cause 3-4kg of almost immediate water loss,” says Galpin.

But ketosis isn’t the same for everyone, every time. It’s a moving target: you might only lapse into it when you drop your carb intake below 20g per day, or you might be able to eat 50g and still reap the rewards. To carry out the diet properly, you need to track your levels using a device. And since a single carrot can toss you out of ketosis, you need to quantify each meal, weighing your food and consulting a nutrition app to calculate the exact ratio of fats to proteins to carbs.

Hunger Management

Within a year of Rogan’s podcast, keto cookbooks flooded the market, searches for keto hit 17 million per month, and Orian Research estimated keto had become a £3.8bn industry. And because people on keto often lack nutrients such as vitamin C, magnesium and fibre, there’s been a supplement gold rush for brands behind products that make staying on the diet easier.

Which brings us back to Thompson and they key question: does keto work for weight loss? In the short term, yes. “But the weight-loss effects are driven primarily by appetite suppression, which in turn regulates calorie intake,” says D’Agostino. In other words, when you limit what you eat, you, well… limit what you eat. As scientific as many purport to be, weight-loss diets usually come down to eating less food.

Consider the results of a recent study in Jama journal, which found no significant difference in the amount of weight loss after one year between people on a low-fat diet and those on a low-carb diet. But the study’s results suggest an important fact about the efficacy of diets. Some people lost 30kg, while others on the same diet gained almost 10kg. Whether it works or not can depend on the individual.

Neil Thompson is now 12 months into his keto journey. “I’m down 23kg,” he says. His friend, meanwhile, bailed after three months, when a cross-country move made it hard to continue. “You can’t cheat, or it knocks you out of ketosis,” says Thompson. He prepares all of his meals at home. A go-to is steak topped with butter and asparagus spears.

Thompson plans to stick to the diet, even though it makes him “that picky arsehole” in social settings. “I recently listened to this debate on The Joe Rogan Experience with D’Agostino and Layne Norton, an expert who was more moderate,” he says. “The conclusion was that the best diet is whatever works for you. Keto works for me.”

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Source link Keto Diet Effects

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Heavy Adults, here are 5 electric scooters for you

Scooters provide both a practical and entertaining method of transportation over short distances and are great for all sorts of applications. On campus, sidewalks, or general transportation, they’re an alternative to walking or biking. It’s great if you’d like to get across short distances in style, or, ease the strain on your legs and joints.

Best electric scooter for heavy adults 2020

Map of contents

TOP 5 Electric Scooters for heavy adults

5. Swagger 5 T

4. Glion Dolly

3. Segway Ninebot MAX

2. QIEWA Q1Hummer

1. Outstorm Ultra

Electric scooters come in various shapes and types. For this article, we’re going over the five best current scooters suited for heavy adults. It’s common to experience strain during movement, but an electric scooter can ease this for those dealing with extreme joint pain (or similar). We’ll focus on a variety of factors, ranging from speed, price, total load, and more.

Worth noting, the scooters we cover will mix between standing and sitting.

What is the Best Electric Scooter for Heavy Adults?

Now, let’s dive into our selections. Economics is the idea behind this selection. Some scooters can easily escalate well beyond the $1K mark, so this is suited for heavy set adults that fit the limit but also want something that’s accessible for short travel. Good for commuting in cities too where walking isn’t exactly practical, but traveling by car isn’t either (at least considering the cost of gas).

Table: 5 Electric scooters for heavy adults

coming soon

5. Swagger 5 T

Starting with a recommendation you may enjoy, the Swagger 5T has all the standard features of an electric scooter with a few additions to make it better. It has a sufficient carrying capacity of up to 320 lbs and works great for adults and the elderly.

Portable and foldable, meaning its light enough to be carried anywhere but doesn’t skip out on its ability to move at practical speeds or carry the user. Price-wise it’s affordable too, with variants starting at $300 USD and typically not exceeding that mark.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

Battery charge time is 3.5 hours for a maximum of 6-11 miles of total travel in between charges

250w motor

Lightweight aluminum frame for support individuals of up to 320 pounds

Foldable design for transportation with speeds of up to 18mph

Integrated app which creates additional security features such as distance tracking, electric locking, and customer support

We like this as an alternative choice to the Glion Dolly as they’re both affordable options capable of supporting heavy adults for short-distance travel. It’s another option for commuting or joint support and works well if it’s impractical to walk. The integrated app is also a great touch and adds some nice support and security features.

Pros

Inexpensive and a great starter model for adults and elderly

Easy to carry around and lightweight thanks to its aluminum frame

Good weight support and decent travel distance

Cons

Slow on steep inclines greater than 20 degrees

Doesn’t have the fastest speed or longest battery lifetime

  4. Glion Dolly

Our 4th option sits at a more affordable price tier and is a good entry model for heavy set adults. It doesn’t come with as many specifications but perfectly suitable for practical travel uses. One of its major advantages is the lightweight design, meaning its easy to carry and transport.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

Lithium-ion battery for up to 15mph of travel speed and 15 miles of distance crossed before recharge

Maximum rider carry weight of up to 255 lbs

250-watt battery with a charge time of 2-3.5 hours

Fork suspension for easy turning

While it doesn’t sport as many features as our initial listing, it’s got enough to work for casual users and heavier adults.

Pros

Lightweight, ergonomic, and easy to transport

Affordable price tier for entry users or those who just need a scooter option starting around the $400 USD mark

Easy to use and safe traveling speed

Cons

While a good entry-choice, features are fairly basic and overall design means the carrying capacity has limits

Best used for economy travel with limited distance capacity

Works best in standard sidewalk applications and not suited for offroad use

  3. Segway Ninebot MAX

Our last pick is another optimal mid-tier scooter hitting plenty of sweet spots for both travel and carrying capacity. If you’re not satisfied with our previous listings, this option might be the right one for you. Backed by a 1 year warranty, it’s a reliable choice and good middle ground between speed and performance.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

70 lbs frame weight with a total carry capacity of up to 220 lbs

Reaches speeds up to 18mph

At full charge can cross distances of up to 40 miles

Dual motor system utilizing Ah battery requiring only 3 hours of charge time

LED lights for evening travel

LCD display detailing drive speeds and other critical information

With an integrated display and some impressive speed and lifetime specs, this is an ideal choice hitting several sweet spots: speed, distance, and weight capacity.

Pros

Nice, short charge time with long distance per charge

LED display to get information about your travel

1 year warranty when purchased from manufacturer backed by customer support

Good speed for fast travel

Cons

Maximum carry capacity could be better

Weights 42lbg

  2. QIEWA Q1Hummer

The next option is a high performance model great for enthusiasts and heavier adults. Its hardware and design not only allow it to hold a carry capacity of up to 550 lbs, but also reach speeds over 30mph. According to the manufacturer, it offers great customer support and performs well on inclines of up to 35 degrees.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

800w electric easy-recharge motor for speeds up to 50kmh (35mph)

Model is designed to be waterproof and sports foldable design

Installed with an anti-theft system

Rider support of weights up to 550 lbs

Incline travel of up to 35 degrees

What we really like to see are scooters that can carry heavier adults but don’t skip on the hardware, such as this one. The performance capabilities here are quite impressive, though, something like this does come at a higher price tier than our previous choices.

Pros

Powerful, long-lasting scooter with great customer support options and durable frame

Anti-theft installed buzzer for safer parking

Great speed and travels long distances before needed a recharge with shock-absorption

High weight capacity

Totals a travel distance of 68miles/100kmh before needing recharge

Cons

Heavy frame, averaging around 50 lbs meaning it can be difficult to transport

Higher price tier which typically exceeds around $1k depending on the vendor

Alternatively, you can look for the QIEWA Qpower for an electric scooter with a 660 carrying capacity.

  1. Outstorm Ultra – the best electric scooter for heavy adults

Our first choice arrives with an arsenal of powerful features suited for enthusiasts and those who need a scooter. It’s durable, maintains a long battery life, and boasts an impressive top speed to boot. It’s also great for heavy set adults who want to enjoy high performance without sacrificing practicality.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

Total battery charge equates to 9 hours equating to roughly 65 miles of distance

Can reach a top speed of 56 MPH utilizing an electric charge

Durable and rugged terrain frame/tire system is perfect for on/off-road applications

LED lights for night travel

3200-watt motor

Foldable and ergonomic design allows for easy transportation

Shock absorption system for smooth travel along with a total carrying capacity of 320 lbs.

As you can see, the Outstorm is feature fit with specifications that work for a variety of uses and needs, even for heavier adults.

Pros

Great topspeed and durable tire system for any terrain

Foldable and easy to transport

Multiple variants (such as scooters with 5000-watt motors)

Good for casual use but also for heavier adults

Cons

Price point, heavy investment and costs typically start around $2000 mark

Does come with a seat option though may not be comfortable for some

While loaded with great features, not ideal for those who need a simple alternative to travel at an affordable price tier

Why get an electric scooter?

Beyond utilizing an electric scooter for joint support, there are a variety of reasons an adult can use a scooter in their day to day life. Scooters are an alternative to typical travel, especially if you don’t have access to a bike (or the area you live in doesn’t support bicycle travel).

It’s faster than walking

Unsurprisingly, an electric scooter is much faster than walking and can get from place to place in half the time. For those that want to get from location to location at an expedited pace, a scooter works well without the need for a vehicle or bicycle. It could range from going to the store to quickly pick up something for dinner, stepping out to eat, taking a casual ride, or any instance where walking is too slow and you’d rather not waste gas. Speaking of…

It’s eco-friendly and saves you money

An electric scooter is precisely that: electric. Modern scooters take advantage of lithium-ion batteries which is a roundabout way of saying they don’t require gas to operate. So, even though it’s a motorized device, you won’t need gas and therefore won’t create additional carbon emissions like you would with a car. Therefore, when you want to get around without the need for a car, you’re helping the environment whether you intended to or not.

Because electric scooters don’t require fuel, you won’t need to spend money on gas either. Scooters can hold charges for several hours, even when not in use. Less gas used means less need to refuel your vehicle, translating to some spare change in saved cash. These days, who doesn’t need the extra dollar or two?

It helps reduce joint pain

Mentioned several times, it’s a great point worth repeating. Heavier adults and elderly are susceptible to joint pain and potentially ligament damage for a variety of health reasons. But, just like everyone, they need to get around, and that’s where electric scooters can help. It isn’t to suggest ligament pain shouldn’t be observed by a medical professional, but reducing strain on the body is an important health factor to consider, and this is where electric scooters provide a benefit.

Is this the best electric scooter for heavy adults?

Pros of Getting an Electric Scooter

Here’s a breakdown of some of the other pros when purchasing an electric scooter.

Easy to use

There is a learning curve, but electric scooters are designed for easy use. You won’t have to spend extra time knowing how to “drive” one as you would with other motorized vehicles.

Few license requirements

It’s unlikely you’ll need a license requirement to operate an electric scooter. Though this depends on the area, an alternative vehicle normally has special license requirements, where electric scooters do not.

Reduced or no maintenance costs

Electric scooters are ready to go without limited or no assembly needed, meaning they’re also free from maintenance hurdles associated with other motor vehicles. That means you won’t have to worry about constantly purchasing and replacing new parts to keep your scooter in normal operating condition.

Electric

We’ve mentioned it several times, but it really bears worth repeating. Electric vehicles are a huge time and money saver and even charging them is inexpensive, versus fuelling them. And, as you know, they produce no emissions.

Portable

While yes, some of our choices and other scooter models can certainly be heavy, that’s not the case for most models. This means electric scooters are easy to transport. Their foldable design allows for easy transportation.

Limited assembly

Aside from instances where installation of certain parts is necessary, electric scooters don’t require any complicated assembly.

Cons of Getting an Electric Scooter

There aren’t many, but there are some factors worth considering before getting an electric scooter.

Price

Even the scooters at the lowest price tier of our list still run up several hundred dollars. No matter how you slice it, it’s a good chunk of cash, while the higher-tier variants can break the one-thousand mark. No matter what, an electric scooter is an investment.

Some maintenance

No, you won’t have to be an expert mechanic, but here and there electric scooters do require a level of maintenance. Typically it involves part replacement after said parts need changing due to use. It’s not the worst thing, but something to consider.

Conclusion

Electric scooters provide a convenient and inexpensive way to travel short or long distances, depending on the needs of the rider. Our list fits different price tiers, needs, and models to hopefully pin down the best unit for you. Naturally, what you select will greatly vary based on your environment, personal weight, and other factors.

You can visit our website for additional selections and options.

The post Heavy Adults, here are 5 electric scooters for you appeared first on ELSkateboards.

Heavy Adults, here are 5 electric scooters for you published first on https://elskateboards.tumblr.com

[elskateboards]

Heavy Adults, here are 5 electric scooters for you

Scooters provide both a practical and entertaining method of transportation over short distances and are great for all sorts of applications. On campus, sidewalks, or general transportation, they’re an alternative to walking or biking. It’s great if you’d like to get across short distances in style, or, ease the strain on your legs and joints.

Best electric scooter for heavy adults 2020

Map of contents

TOP 5 Electric Scooters for heavy adults

5. Swagger 5 T

4. Glion Dolly

3. Segway Ninebot MAX

2. QIEWA Q1Hummer

1. Outstorm Ultra

Electric scooters come in various shapes and types. For this article, we’re going over the five best current scooters suited for heavy adults. It’s common to experience strain during movement, but an electric scooter can ease this for those dealing with extreme joint pain (or similar). We’ll focus on a variety of factors, ranging from speed, price, total load, and more.

Worth noting, the scooters we cover will mix between standing and sitting.

  What is the Best Electric Scooter for Heavy Adults?

Now, let’s dive into our selections. Economics is the idea behind this selection. Some scooters can easily escalate well beyond the $1K mark, so this is suited for heavy set adults that fit the limit but also want something that’s accessible for short travel. Good for commuting in cities too where walking isn’t exactly practical, but traveling by car isn’t either (at least considering the cost of gas).

Table: 5 Electric scooters for heavy adults

coming soon

  5. Swagger 5 T

Starting with a recommendation you may enjoy, the Swagger 5T has all the standard features of an electric scooter with a few additions to make it better. It has a sufficient carrying capacity of up to 320 lbs and works great for adults and the elderly.

Portable and foldable, meaning its light enough to be carried anywhere but doesn’t skip out on its ability to move at practical speeds or carry the user. Price-wise it’s affordable too, with variants starting at $300 USD and typically not exceeding that mark.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

Battery charge time is 3.5 hours for a maximum of 6-11 miles of total travel in between charges

250w motor

Lightweight aluminum frame for support individuals of up to 320 pounds

Foldable design for transportation with speeds of up to 18mph

Integrated app which creates additional security features such as distance tracking, electric locking, and customer support

We like this as an alternative choice to the Glion Dolly as they’re both affordable options capable of supporting heavy adults for short-distance travel. It’s another option for commuting or joint support and works well if it’s impractical to walk. The integrated app is also a great touch and adds some nice support and security features.

Pros

Inexpensive and a great starter model for adults and elderly

Easy to carry around and lightweight thanks to its aluminum frame

Good weight support and decent travel distance

Cons

Slow on steep inclines greater than 20 degrees

Doesn’t have the fastest speed or longest battery lifetime

    4. Glion Dolly

Our 4th option sits at a more affordable price tier and is a good entry model for heavy set adults. It doesn’t come with as many specifications but perfectly suitable for practical travel uses. One of its major advantages is the lightweight design, meaning its easy to carry and transport.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

Lithium-ion battery for up to 15mph of travel speed and 15 miles of distance crossed before recharge

Maximum rider carry weight of up to 255 lbs

250-watt battery with a charge time of 2-3.5 hours

Fork suspension for easy turning

While it doesn’t sport as many features as our initial listing, it’s got enough to work for casual users and heavier adults.

Pros

Lightweight, ergonomic, and easy to transport

Affordable price tier for entry users or those who just need a scooter option starting around the $400 USD mark

Easy to use and safe traveling speed

Cons

While a good entry-choice, features are fairly basic and overall design means the carrying capacity has limits

Best used for economy travel with limited distance capacity

Works best in standard sidewalk applications and not suited for offroad use

    3. Segway Ninebot MAX

Our last pick is another optimal mid-tier scooter hitting plenty of sweet spots for both travel and carrying capacity. If you’re not satisfied with our previous listings, this option might be the right one for you. Backed by a 1 year warranty, it’s a reliable choice and good middle ground between speed and performance.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

70 lbs frame weight with a total carry capacity of up to 220 lbs

Reaches speeds up to 18mph

At full charge can cross distances of up to 40 miles

Dual motor system utilizing Ah battery requiring only 3 hours of charge time

LED lights for evening travel

LCD display detailing drive speeds and other critical information

With an integrated display and some impressive speed and lifetime specs, this is an ideal choice hitting several sweet spots: speed, distance, and weight capacity.

Pros

Nice, short charge time with long distance per charge

LED display to get information about your travel

1 year warranty when purchased from manufacturer backed by customer support

Good speed for fast travel

Cons

Maximum carry capacity could be better

Weights 42lbg

    2. QIEWA Q1Hummer

The next option is a high performance model great for enthusiasts and heavier adults. Its hardware and design not only allow it to hold a carry capacity of up to 550 lbs, but also reach speeds over 30mph. According to the manufacturer, it offers great customer support and performs well on inclines of up to 35 degrees.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

800w electric easy-recharge motor for speeds up to 50kmh (35mph)

Model is designed to be waterproof and sports foldable design

Installed with an anti-theft system

Rider support of weights up to 550 lbs

Incline travel of up to 35 degrees

What we really like to see are scooters that can carry heavier adults but don’t skip on the hardware, such as this one. The performance capabilities here are quite impressive, though, something like this does come at a higher price tier than our previous choices.

Pros

Powerful, long-lasting scooter with great customer support options and durable frame

Anti-theft installed buzzer for safer parking

Great speed and travels long distances before needed a recharge with shock-absorption

High weight capacity

Totals a travel distance of 68miles/100kmh before needing recharge

Cons

Heavy frame, averaging around 50 lbs meaning it can be difficult to transport

Higher price tier which typically exceeds around $1k depending on the vendor

Alternatively, you can look for the QIEWA Qpower for an electric scooter with a 660 carrying capacity.

    1. Outstorm Ultra – the best electric scooter for heavy adults

Our first choice arrives with an arsenal of powerful features suited for enthusiasts and those who need a scooter. It’s durable, maintains a long battery life, and boasts an impressive top speed to boot. It’s also great for heavy set adults who want to enjoy high performance without sacrificing practicality.

See the best offer from: Amazon

Specs Overview

Total battery charge equates to 9 hours equating to roughly 65 miles of distance

Can reach a top speed of 56 MPH utilizing an electric charge

Durable and rugged terrain frame/tire system is perfect for on/off-road applications

LED lights for night travel

3200-watt motor

Foldable and ergonomic design allows for easy transportation

Shock absorption system for smooth travel along with a total carrying capacity of 320 lbs.

As you can see, the Outstorm is feature fit with specifications that work for a variety of uses and needs, even for heavier adults.

Pros

Great topspeed and durable tire system for any terrain

Foldable and easy to transport

Multiple variants (such as scooters with 5000-watt motors)

Good for casual use but also for heavier adults

Cons

Price point, heavy investment and costs typically start around $2000 mark

Does come with a seat option though may not be comfortable for some

While loaded with great features, not ideal for those who need a simple alternative to travel at an affordable price tier

  Why get an electric scooter?

Beyond utilizing an electric scooter for joint support, there are a variety of reasons an adult can use a scooter in their day to day life. Scooters are an alternative to typical travel, especially if you don’t have access to a bike (or the area you live in doesn’t support bicycle travel).

It’s faster than walking

Unsurprisingly, an electric scooter is much faster than walking and can get from place to place in half the time. For those that want to get from location to location at an expedited pace, a scooter works well without the need for a vehicle or bicycle. It could range from going to the store to quickly pick up something for dinner, stepping out to eat, taking a casual ride, or any instance where walking is too slow and you’d rather not waste gas. Speaking of. . .

It’s eco-friendly and saves you money

An electric scooter is precisely that: electric. Modern scooters take advantage of lithium-ion batteries which is a roundabout way of saying they don’t require gas to operate. So, even though it’s a motorized device, you won’t need gas and therefore won’t create additional carbon emissions like you would with a car. Therefore, when you want to get around without the need for a car, you’re helping the environment whether you intended to or not.

Because electric scooters don’t require fuel, you won’t need to spend money on gas either. Scooters can hold charges for several hours, even when not in use. Less gas used means less need to refuel your vehicle, translating to some spare change in saved cash. These days, who doesn’t need the extra dollar or two?

It helps reduce joint pain

Mentioned several times, it’s a great point worth repeating. Heavier adults and elderly are susceptible to joint pain and potentially ligament damage for a variety of health reasons. But, just like everyone, they need to get around, and that’s where electric scooters can help. It isn’t to suggest ligament pain shouldn’t be observed by a medical professional, but reducing strain on the body is an important health factor to consider, and this is where electric scooters provide a benefit.

Is this the best electric scooter for heavy adults?

  Pros of Getting an Electric Scooter

Here’s a breakdown of some of the other pros when purchasing an electric scooter.

Easy to use

There is a learning curve, but electric scooters are designed for easy use. You won’t have to spend extra time knowing how to “drive” one as you would with other motorized vehicles.

Few license requirements

It’s unlikely you’ll need a license requirement to operate an electric scooter. Though this depends on the area, an alternative vehicle normally has special license requirements, where electric scooters do not.

Reduced or no maintenance costs

Electric scooters are ready to go without limited or no assembly needed, meaning they’re also free from maintenance hurdles associated with other motor vehicles. That means you won’t have to worry about constantly purchasing and replacing new parts to keep your scooter in normal operating condition.

Electric

We’ve mentioned it several times, but it really bears worth repeating. Electric vehicles are a huge time and money saver and even charging them is inexpensive, versus fuelling them. And, as you know, they produce no emissions.

Portable

While yes, some of our choices and other scooter models can certainly be heavy, that’s not the case for most models. This means electric scooters are easy to transport. Their foldable design allows for easy transportation.

Limited assembly

Aside from instances where installation of certain parts is necessary, electric scooters don’t require any complicated assembly.

  Cons of Getting an Electric Scooter

There aren’t many, but there are some factors worth considering before getting an electric scooter.

Price

Even the scooters at the lowest price tier of our list still run up several hundred dollars. No matter how you slice it, it’s a good chunk of cash, while the higher-tier variants can break the one-thousand mark. No matter what, an electric scooter is an investment.

Some maintenance

No, you won’t have to be an expert mechanic, but here and there electric scooters do require a level of maintenance. Typically it involves part replacement after said parts need changing due to use. It’s not the worst thing, but something to consider.

  Conclusion

Electric scooters provide a convenient and inexpensive way to travel short or long distances, depending on the needs of the rider. Our list fits different price tiers, needs, and models to hopefully pin down the best unit for you. Naturally, what you select will greatly vary based on your environment, personal weight, and other factors.

  You can visit our website for additional selections and options.

The post Heavy Adults, here are 5 electric scooters for you appeared first on ELSkateboards.

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If my car got towed will that affect my insurance and registration >??? pls answer asap?

If my car got towed will that affect my insurance and registration >??? pls answer asap?

If my car got towed will that affect my insurance and registration >??? pls answer asap?

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If my car got towed will that affect my insurance and registration >??? pls answer asap?

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If my car got towed will that affect my insurance and registration >??? pls answer asap?

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Razor Dune Buggy Review

So your child wants to get out into nature and away from video games by riding a 4 wheeler. That’s a victory for parents in this day and age. But as a parent (aka grown adult) it virtually impossible for you to test a kid’s or children’s sized dune buddy yourself. It also ain’t easy finding test models so that your kid can try them all out. So that’s why you’re here. You and your child are looking at the battery-powered Razor Dune Buggy, but you have a ton of questions. I’m here to answer them with this review since I recently teamed up with nephew and tested this ride-on toy thoroughly. I’m also too big to test this one myself, so I enlisted the help of a young relative, and together we put this battery operated vehicle through its paces. He was more than happy to help out and I scored some sweet uncle-points because who else has an uncle that says, “Okay kid, get in this awesome 4-wheeler so we can have fun and test it out!” Yeah, I’m awesome like that.

Is the Razor Dune Buggy One of the Best Dune Buggies or a Buggy Bud?

The good news is that the Razor Dune Buggy is a fun and more importantly SAFE dune buggy that is easy to ride and has some great features. Your child will be safe thanks to: Key Features

A built-in safety belt

A speed of only 10 mph

And a durable tubular steel frame.

Some of the Razor Dune Buggy’s features include:

Powerful 350 W motor

10 mph maximum speed

8-inch knobby pneumatic tires

Strong tubular steel frame

Padded bucket seat with a seatbelt

Hand throttle and brake controls

Adjustable speed

120-pound weight limit

Safety flag

Age range of 8 and older

The manufacturer, Razor is a top-selling brand that makes hoverboards, scooters and even mini ATVs for kids. They have a reputation for making fun vehicles that are safe, durable and loved by kids everywhere. They make scooters like the Razor e100 and Razor e200. Some of their coolest dune buggies include the Force Drifter and Ground Force Drifter. So how does this dune buggy go kart stack up? Is it up to their usual quality? Read on for our Razor dune buggy review and buying guide. Pros:

Durable Steel Frame

Terrain Following Rear Suspension

Powerful 350watt Electric Motor

Cons:

Charge Time Is 5 Hours

Ground Clearance Is A Bit Too Low

Low Max Speed

Razor Dune Buggy Build Quality

Let’s be honest, kids are not gentle with their toys. So a vehicle like this one is going to get abused and handled roughly with every ride. So I was very happy to see that the Razor Dune Buggy has a very solid and rugged tubular steel frame. Your kids will have a hard time damaging this heavy duty 65 lb frame. At that weight, the frame also helps to keep the vehicle upright during tight turns. The design of the frame is sort of a half roll cage design that keeps your kid from falling out during those turns but also lets them get in and out of the driver’s seat easily. The quality of the construction here is very impressive and one of the best I’ve seen in a child’s electric vehicle. Many go karts and 4 wheelers have cheap plastic frames that crack after so many hours of playtime. This frame is going to stand up to just about anything. The quality here is something that you normally see in more expensive dune racers.

Razor Dune Buggy Design

When it comes to design, what Razor delivers for kids can be hit or miss. For instance, some of their electric scooters are just plain ugly, while others are very sleek and modern. In this case, the  Razor Dune Buggy is very well designed. It has the style of the classic dune buggies or go-karts that you know and love and the shape seats your child comfortably. It’s very minimal in design, but every part here looks good and is quality made.  It’s a ride that is low to the ground and heavy enough that the large 8-inch pneumatic tires hug the terrain nicely no matter if it is sand, grass, rocks or when zipping across the driveway. Paying special attention to safety with this model, they have also included a safety flag so that this vehicle is more easily seen. That not only helps other vehicles see it more clearly, but it also helps parents to easily see where their child is at all times. Both the speed throttle and rear disc brakes are easily accessible on the steering wheel as well. It also has quality plate floorboards. Considering all of these design factors, I have to say that I was really impressed by how much thought went into safety. This is probably the safest buggy for kids I have seen for this age group, so it gets extra points for that. If you feel like the speed is too fast for your kid, you can adjust the top speed by using the supplied Allen wrench. This lets you limit the speed and adjust braking controls.  Then when they are ready for higher speeds, you can adjust it again to speed things up. It’s nice being able to have variable speed in this way. I kind of wish it had a remote control so that you could set features like this more easily, but it’s pretty quick to do it with the Allen wrench anyway.

How Powerful Is The Razor Dune Buggy?

The 350 W engine provides plenty of power for your child’s off-road adventures, with a top speed of 10 miles per hour. That’s plenty of speed for any daredevil, but not so fast that it puts them in serious danger. It performs like a champ on asphalt, grass, gravel and other terrains. Even with kids riding it in wet conditions, it didn’t seem to slow it down. The throttle responds well and the brakes are also very responsive so that you can be sure the vehicle will stop when you need it to stop. Forget kids dirt bikes and other gas-powered vehicles. This is a ride that’s perfect for kids and teens. A great little dirt rocket.

Battery Life

When you first get your Razor Electric Dune Buggy you will have to charge it for a longer period the first time since it has been sitting on the warehouse shelf. Razor recommends an 18 hour charge time for this first charge. Other models have a shorter initial charge time, like 12 hours, so this was my only real gripe about this model. That way your battery will be fully charged and ready to go after that. Each battery charging will give you about an hour of run time and it takes about 5 hours to fully charge the batteries at that point. That’s a better run time than many competitors, which usually give you about 40 minutes or so. Again, it’s beating the competition’s ride on toys in that department. This youth ATV operates on a 24V rechargeable battery system that consists of two 12V batteries.

Bottom Line and Razor Dune Buggy Review Wrap Up

This kids electric dune buggy is worth every penny. Razor has built another quality kids vehicle in this 4 wheeler. It’s very similar to the Razor Ground Force model. Parents will appreciate the extra attention to safety thanks to key features like the safety flag, a solid steel frame, seat belt and a respectable speed of 10 miles per hour. Your kids will love how it performs. This is an electric toy that will keep them outdoors and away from video games. Visually, the design looks great, but more importantly, it is designed to make sure that your kids have a fun time and don’t get hurt. This dune buggy’s best features are a powerful motor, large pneumatic tires, comfortable padded bucket seat,  thumb trigger accelerator, and a hand-operated rear disk braking system. The end result of all of these features is a 4 wheeler that that is comfortable for your child and easy to use.  It’s a great performer on nearly any terrain with those large knobby tires and if you have flat terrain they will speed around even faster. Between the low center of gravity and that half roll cage, it is very unlikely that your child will fall out, even when taking tight turns. The tires and the terrain seem to work together in fact, so it’s a fun ride. With a weight limit of 120 pounds, some older kids can ride too. If you are looking for a special gift for your kid and are considering a dune buggy type racer, you can’t go wrong with this one. It’s one of the best karts for kids out there and it’s a great first vehicle. After they master this they will want to move up to a Razor Dirt Quad.

Razor Dune Buggy Review was first published on GadgetReview on Tech

Razor Dune Buggy Review published first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/ Razor Dune Buggy Review published first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/ Razor Dune Buggy Review posted first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/

[angelaakers]

Razor Dune Buggy Review

So your child wants to get out into nature and away from video games by riding a 4 wheeler. That’s a victory for parents in this day and age. But as a parent (aka grown adult) it virtually impossible for you to test a kid’s or children’s sized dune buddy yourself. It also ain’t easy finding test models so that your kid can try them all out. So that’s why you’re here. You and your child are looking at the battery-powered Razor Dune Buggy, but you have a ton of questions. I’m here to answer them with this review since I recently teamed up with nephew and tested this ride-on toy thoroughly. I’m also too big to test this one myself, so I enlisted the help of a young relative, and together we put this battery operated vehicle through its paces. He was more than happy to help out and I scored some sweet uncle-points because who else has an uncle that says, “Okay kid, get in this awesome 4-wheeler so we can have fun and test it out!” Yeah, I’m awesome like that.

Is the Razor Dune Buggy One of the Best Dune Buggies or a Buggy Bud?

The good news is that the Razor Dune Buggy is a fun and more importantly SAFE dune buggy that is easy to ride and has some great features. Your child will be safe thanks to: Key Features

A built-in safety belt

A speed of only 10 mph

And a durable tubular steel frame.

Some of the Razor Dune Buggy’s features include:

Powerful 350 W motor

10 mph maximum speed

8-inch knobby pneumatic tires

Strong tubular steel frame

Padded bucket seat with a seatbelt

Hand throttle and brake controls

Adjustable speed

120-pound weight limit

Safety flag

Age range of 8 and older

The manufacturer, Razor is a top-selling brand that makes hoverboards, scooters and even mini ATVs for kids. They have a reputation for making fun vehicles that are safe, durable and loved by kids everywhere. They make scooters like the Razor e100 and Razor e200. Some of their coolest dune buggies include the Force Drifter and Ground Force Drifter. So how does this dune buggy go kart stack up? Is it up to their usual quality? Read on for our Razor dune buggy review and buying guide. Pros:

Durable Steel Frame

Terrain Following Rear Suspension

Powerful 350watt Electric Motor

Cons:

Charge Time Is 5 Hours

Ground Clearance Is A Bit Too Low

Low Max Speed

Razor Dune Buggy Build Quality

Let’s be honest, kids are not gentle with their toys. So a vehicle like this one is going to get abused and handled roughly with every ride. So I was very happy to see that the Razor Dune Buggy has a very solid and rugged tubular steel frame. Your kids will have a hard time damaging this heavy duty 65 lb frame. At that weight, the frame also helps to keep the vehicle upright during tight turns. The design of the frame is sort of a half roll cage design that keeps your kid from falling out during those turns but also lets them get in and out of the driver’s seat easily. The quality of the construction here is very impressive and one of the best I’ve seen in a child’s electric vehicle. Many go karts and 4 wheelers have cheap plastic frames that crack after so many hours of playtime. This frame is going to stand up to just about anything. The quality here is something that you normally see in more expensive dune racers.

Razor Dune Buggy Design

When it comes to design, what Razor delivers for kids can be hit or miss. For instance, some of their electric scooters are just plain ugly, while others are very sleek and modern. In this case, the  Razor Dune Buggy is very well designed. It has the style of the classic dune buggies or go-karts that you know and love and the shape seats your child comfortably. It’s very minimal in design, but every part here looks good and is quality made.  It’s a ride that is low to the ground and heavy enough that the large 8-inch pneumatic tires hug the terrain nicely no matter if it is sand, grass, rocks or when zipping across the driveway. Paying special attention to safety with this model, they have also included a safety flag so that this vehicle is more easily seen. That not only helps other vehicles see it more clearly, but it also helps parents to easily see where their child is at all times. Both the speed throttle and rear disc brakes are easily accessible on the steering wheel as well. It also has quality plate floorboards. Considering all of these design factors, I have to say that I was really impressed by how much thought went into safety. This is probably the safest buggy for kids I have seen for this age group, so it gets extra points for that. If you feel like the speed is too fast for your kid, you can adjust the top speed by using the supplied Allen wrench. This lets you limit the speed and adjust braking controls.  Then when they are ready for higher speeds, you can adjust it again to speed things up. It’s nice being able to have variable speed in this way. I kind of wish it had a remote control so that you could set features like this more easily, but it’s pretty quick to do it with the Allen wrench anyway.

How Powerful Is The Razor Dune Buggy?

The 350 W engine provides plenty of power for your child’s off-road adventures, with a top speed of 10 miles per hour. That’s plenty of speed for any daredevil, but not so fast that it puts them in serious danger. It performs like a champ on asphalt, grass, gravel and other terrains. Even with kids riding it in wet conditions, it didn’t seem to slow it down. The throttle responds well and the brakes are also very responsive so that you can be sure the vehicle will stop when you need it to stop. Forget kids dirt bikes and other gas-powered vehicles. This is a ride that’s perfect for kids and teens. A great little dirt rocket.

Battery Life

When you first get your Razor Electric Dune Buggy you will have to charge it for a longer period the first time since it has been sitting on the warehouse shelf. Razor recommends an 18 hour charge time for this first charge. Other models have a shorter initial charge time, like 12 hours, so this was my only real gripe about this model. That way your battery will be fully charged and ready to go after that. Each battery charging will give you about an hour of run time and it takes about 5 hours to fully charge the batteries at that point. That’s a better run time than many competitors, which usually give you about 40 minutes or so. Again, it’s beating the competition’s ride on toys in that department. This youth ATV operates on a 24V rechargeable battery system that consists of two 12V batteries.

Bottom Line and Razor Dune Buggy Review Wrap Up

This kids electric dune buggy is worth every penny. Razor has built another quality kids vehicle in this 4 wheeler. It’s very similar to the Razor Ground Force model. Parents will appreciate the extra attention to safety thanks to key features like the safety flag, a solid steel frame, seat belt and a respectable speed of 10 miles per hour. Your kids will love how it performs. This is an electric toy that will keep them outdoors and away from video games. Visually, the design looks great, but more importantly, it is designed to make sure that your kids have a fun time and don’t get hurt. This dune buggy’s best features are a powerful motor, large pneumatic tires, comfortable padded bucket seat,  thumb trigger accelerator, and a hand-operated rear disk braking system. The end result of all of these features is a 4 wheeler that that is comfortable for your child and easy to use.  It’s a great performer on nearly any terrain with those large knobby tires and if you have flat terrain they will speed around even faster. Between the low center of gravity and that half roll cage, it is very unlikely that your child will fall out, even when taking tight turns. The tires and the terrain seem to work together in fact, so it’s a fun ride. With a weight limit of 120 pounds, some older kids can ride too. If you are looking for a special gift for your kid and are considering a dune buggy type racer, you can’t go wrong with this one. It’s one of the best karts for kids out there and it’s a great first vehicle. After they master this they will want to move up to a Razor Dirt Quad.

Razor Dune Buggy Review was first published on GadgetReview on Tech

Razor Dune Buggy Review published first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/ Razor Dune Buggy Review posted first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/ Razor Dune Buggy Review published first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/

[architectnews]

"Taking credit for trees planted elsewhere is a whole lot of embodied irony"

Architecture firm Perkins&Will has gone too far with claims that a luxury timber home on a Canadian mountain removes more atmospheric carbon than it emits, argues Fred A Bernstein.

For much of last winter, Perkins&Will, an architecture firm with 25 offices from San Francisco to Singapore to Sao Paulo, used a photo of a wooden house in British Columbia as one of the "hero images" on its website.

The house, which sits alone on a mountaintop overlooking the Soo Valley 90 miles north of Vancouver, is certainly beautiful, but the firm had other reasons for splashing it across its homepage. The 321-square-metre dwelling, known as the SoLo House, is meant to be a model of sustainability.

Entirely off the grid, it is designed to operate with power from 103 solar panels on its south facade, a 96-kilowatt-hour battery pack to store electricity for nights and cloudy days (both of which are frequent in British Columbia), and a hydrogen fuel cell for winter.

With all that equipment, the house may well be able to function without utility hook-ups. But Perkins&Will has made a far more surprising and audacious claim: that the building's structure is "beyond carbon neutral," meaning that it will remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emitted in the first place.

It seemed to be giving its clients permission to build willy-nilly at a time of climate crisis

In a slickly produced video on the firm's website, Perkins&Will architect Alysia Baldwin says the house "proves that buildings can counteract their negative consequences and act as a source of repair."

People listen to Perkins&Will, a firm that has positioned itself as a leader in green building. "For nearly a quarter of a century, we've been at the vanguard of the sustainability movement," its website declares. Journalists have tended to repeat its claims.

But this time it had gone too far. By constructing a showplace of a house on an otherwise pristine mountaintop, and claiming it had helped the environment by doing so, it seemed to be giving its clients permission to build willy-nilly at a time of climate crisis.

Looking at SoLo House, with its cathedral ceilings, its comfortable sectional sofas and its giant picture windows, then listening to Perkins&Will claim that its structure reduces atmospheric carbon, I'm reminded of the old punchline: "Who are you going to believe – me, or your lying eyes?"

Reducing a building's contribution to atmospheric carbon means making it small, keeping it simple, building it near existing infrastructure, avoiding the need for heavy equipment such as batteries and fuel cells and using the lowest-embodied-energy building materials.

Reducing a building's contribution to atmospheric carbon means making it small

Perkins&Will, normally an excellent firm, has done those things on other projects. But with SoLo House, it seems not to have even tried.

According to experts, 40 per cent of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from buildings. Some emissions are attributable to running appliances and systems – so-called operational energy. The rest comes from the power needed to produce the building in the first place, known as embodied energy.

Incredibly, Perkins&Will is claiming there is "no embodied energy" in the house's structure (by which it means the elements that keep the building standing). To its credit, the firm answered requests for information promptly, providing facts, figures and charts prepared by Baldwin and her colleague Cillian Collins, a senior architect.

Here's how Baldwin and Collins arrived at their no-embodied-energy claim: First they estimated the amount of structural wood, steel and concrete in SoLo House. And then they turned to Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, an app that approximates the amount of energy needed to produce given amounts of each building material and the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere as a result of that energy use.

Athena told them that producing the steel and concrete, harvesting the wood and so on in SoLo House released 122 tonnes of CO2 (sometimes called CO2e, for CO2 and its equivalents) into the atmosphere.

That should have been the beginning – not the end – of the process of calculating the building's embodied energy. There are hundreds of other items that needed to be counted. Start with the roof. The walls. The windows (a massive item, given the need for triple glazing). The solar panels, the batteries, the hydrogen fuel cells. The furniture. The appliances. The plumbing. The heating and cooling systems. Lots and lots of insulation.

The list goes on. Each of those items has significant embodied energy. Transporting all of those materials to a remote mountaintop site adds more.

Perkins&Will failed to account for those sources of embodied energy. Baldwin was clear, in a letter to me, that the calculations were limited to the structure. But why would anyone stop there? According to Baldwin, it's because structure "represents the largest contribution to a typical building's embodied carbon impacts."

It may also be because Athena only applies to structure. (Athena is meant primarily for comparing how the choice of a structural material affects a building's embodied energy. An architect might enter plans for the same building, once with a concrete frame and once with a steel frame, and see how the embodied carbon figures differ.)

Of course, there are other ways to estimate the house's total embodied energy; one method is to use an online tool called Tally, which provides information on the embodied energy of numerous building components. Counting everything isn't easy, but other firms have done it.

Perkins&Will had a way of making it vanish, if not from the atmosphere then from the balance sheet

Even so, according to Athena, the house emitted 122 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. That sounds like a lot of carbon, but Perkins&Will had a way of making it vanish, if not from the atmosphere then from the balance sheet.

Much of SoLo House is made of wood. Wood, like all plants, is produced by photosynthesis from ingredients that include carbon dioxide. Thus trees are said to store (or sequester) carbon. They do, but probably not as much as people think, as I learned by studying the question at length.

Here's Perkins&Will's theory: If you cut down a tree and use the wood as a building material, that carbon sequestered in that tree becomes part of the building. Then, if you plant a new tree in place of the one you cut down, the new tree will sequester additional carbon as it grows. Thus the process (cutting down one tree, planting another) results, net-net, in carbon being removed from the atmosphere.

There are so many problems with that theory it's hard to know where to begin. To name a few:

1) You have to be sure a new tree will be planted in place of the one you cut down; will get to be as big as the one you cut down; and will live a long, healthy life. (If a tree burns, or decomposes, as billions of trees do every year, its embodied carbon is released right into the atmosphere.)

2) You can't waste any of the wood. That's a problem because converting a tree into lumber usually turns half the wood into sawdust or chips, which could end up being burnt or allowed to decompose. This problem alone suggests carbon sequestration figures should be cut in half.

3) The wood has to stay in or on the building for a very long time. If the building needs repairs, and lumber is removed, it may be recycled, but it may also be burnt or allowed to decompose. And who'll be watching in 20 or 50 years?

4) Let's be honest: You could have planted the new tree somewhere else, and not cut down the first tree to begin with. For that reason, no number of trees excuses a wasteful building.

5) Even if the new trees do sequester carbon, the process will take decades. Scientists who study global warming warn of tipping points and thresholds, some of which could be reached within the next ten years. If new buildings help push atmospheric carbon levels to a point of no return, the sequestration accomplished by newly planted trees will be too little, too late.

6) It's a logical impossibility. If you really believe SoLo House repairs the atmosphere, all you have to do is build enough SoLo Houses and climate change will go away. Now for our next trick ...

No number of trees excuses a wasteful building

No wonder the theory is highly controversial. A whole lot of things have to happen just right for it to become a reality. As Baldwin wrote in an email: "We acknowledge that not all timber sources perform equally in the realm of embodied carbon reduction."

"Much of the embodied carbon reduction achieved by timber is directly attributed to sustainable forestry management practices that ensure forestry operations are carried out in a way that allows forests to remain healthy and viable for future generations," she added. "These practices include conservation and protection, land use planning, regulation of timber harvesting, establishing practices to ensure forest regrow, and continuous monitoring and reporting to government."

She went on to admit that the tool used to determine the building's sequestered carbon, WoodWorks Carbon Calculator, a product of the Washington-based Wood Products Council, considers "much of this storage to be temporary and therefore [does] not give the building a carbon credit for the carbon dioxide that will eventually be released from this wood some time down the road, through decay or incineration."

But that didn't stop the firm from banking on the theory when it performed its embodied energy calculation. Using the Carbon Calculator, it determined that the amount of lumber in the building would result in the removal – through the planting of new trees – of 145 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. That's a bit more than the 122 tonnes the firm says the building's timber, concrete, and steel released into the atmosphere.

Converting a tree into lumber usually turns half the wood into sawdust or chips

So in this case, reducing E (embodied carbon) by S (sequestered carbon) produces a negative number – minus 22 tonnes, meaning that building the house decreased the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. (Indeed, the house's owner, Delta Land Development, refers to it as "climate positive.")

Perkins & Will firm produced a chart to make this clear:

As Baldwin puts it, SoLo House "is able to store more carbon in its structure than was released during the production, manufacturing, and construction of the project."

That's a highly suspect statement. Based on everything I've learned, E (embodied energy) may be much greater than Perkins&Will says it is, and S (sequestered carbon) much lower.

In a letter responding to points in this article prior to publication, Perkins&Will wrote the following (the client, Delta Land Development, did not respond to requests for comment):

"Through careful selection of low embodied carbon and locally sourced materials, the project prioritized a mass timber structure. The design team used industry-accepted LCA [life cycle assessment] tools to quantify the carbon sequestration potential of the structure, and the timber structure is modelled to sequester 145 tonnes of CO2e as biogenic carbon."

Reusing/recycling is always the greenest strategy

"Structural elements typically represent the largest embodied carbon profile of [a] project, and as such, the structure was prioritized from an embodied carbon perspective."

"As designers, we rely on reputable industry tools to estimate the impact of projects. We used the Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings to complete this assessment. Athena uses ongoing research by the Athena Institute and complies with ISO 14040 (environmental management, life cycle assessment, and principles and framework) and ISO 14044 (environmental management, life cycle assessment, and requirements and guidelines)."

"Per our previous correspondence, we shared the Athena Institute's definition of biogenic sequestered carbon, which considers the whole life cycle of the material, including extraction, manufacturing, forms of transportation, installation, repair and maintenance, and end of life (assuming reuse of the wood)."

However, if Perkins and Will had really wanted to reduce embodied carbon, it would have thought about some of these strategies:

1) Putting the house in an easily accessible location, thus cutting out hundreds or thousands of trips by delivery people and construction workers. (Perkins&Will points out "that the wood was sourced from within British Columbia, and the building panels were manufactured in Pemberton, BC, which is located 30 minutes from the site.")

2) Renovating an existing house. Reusing/recycling is always the greenest strategy. Renovation typically generates 50 to 75 per cent less atmospheric carbon than new construction.

3) Choosing a site where there are no trees to cut down. According to Perkins&Will, "A clearing was required for a driveway, solar access, and fire protection. It required harvesting 180m³ of second-growth hemlock timber. This wood was put into the BC forestry chain, becoming useful lumber." Taking credit for sequestration by trees that may have been planted elsewhere, while cutting down enough trees on site to fill a five-meter by six-meter by six-meter container, is a whole lot of embodied irony.

4) Making the house a lot smaller. When it comes to saving energy, less is definitely more.

5) Choosing versions of steel and concrete with the lowest embodied energy (a lot of research is being done on ways of making those materials less "carbon-intensive").

Perkins&Will appears not to have done these things — the actual work required to reduce carbon emissions. The danger is that people will believe its claims.

Fred A Bernstein studied architecture at Princeton and law at NYU and writes about both subjects. He has published articles about embodied energy – a significant component of the climate crisis – in Oculus (a primer), in Architect Magazine (an admonition to architecture critics) and in the Architect's Newspaper (a warning that efforts to make buildings resilient are often detrimental from an embodied energy standpoint).

Carbon revolution

This article is part of Dezeen's carbon revolution series, which explores how this miracle material could be removed from the atmosphere and put to use on earth. Read all the content at: www.dezeen.com/carbon.

The sky photograph used in the carbon revolution graphic is by Taylor van Riper via Unsplash.

The post "Taking credit for trees planted elsewhere is a whole lot of embodied irony" appeared first on Dezeen.

[coniecoleman]

Razor Dune Buggy Review

So your child wants to get out into nature and away from video games by riding a 4 wheeler. That’s a victory for parents in this day and age. But as a parent (aka grown adult) it virtually impossible for you to test a kid’s or children’s sized dune buddy yourself. It also ain’t easy finding test models so that your kid can try them all out. So that’s why you’re here. You and your child are looking at the battery-powered Razor Dune Buggy, but you have a ton of questions. I’m here to answer them with this review since I recently teamed up with nephew and tested this ride-on toy thoroughly. I’m also too big to test this one myself, so I enlisted the help of a young relative, and together we put this battery operated vehicle through its paces. He was more than happy to help out and I scored some sweet uncle-points because who else has an uncle that says, “Okay kid, get in this awesome 4-wheeler so we can have fun and test it out!” Yeah, I’m awesome like that.

Is the Razor Dune Buggy One of the Best Dune Buggies or a Buggy Bud?

The good news is that the Razor Dune Buggy is a fun and more importantly SAFE dune buggy that is easy to ride and has some great features. Your child will be safe thanks to: Key Features

A built-in safety belt

A speed of only 10 mph

And a durable tubular steel frame.

Some of the Razor Dune Buggy’s features include:

Powerful 350 W motor

10 mph maximum speed

8-inch knobby pneumatic tires

Strong tubular steel frame

Padded bucket seat with a seatbelt

Hand throttle and brake controls

Adjustable speed

120-pound weight limit

Safety flag

Age range of 8 and older

The manufacturer, Razor is a top-selling brand that makes hoverboards, scooters and even mini ATVs for kids. They have a reputation for making fun vehicles that are safe, durable and loved by kids everywhere. They make scooters like the Razor e100 and Razor e200. Some of their coolest dune buggies include the Force Drifter and Ground Force Drifter. So how does this dune buggy go kart stack up? Is it up to their usual quality? Read on for our Razor dune buggy review and buying guide. Pros:

Durable Steel Frame

Terrain Following Rear Suspension

Powerful 350watt Electric Motor

Cons:

Charge Time Is 5 Hours

Ground Clearance Is A Bit Too Low

Low Max Speed

Razor Dune Buggy Build Quality

Let’s be honest, kids are not gentle with their toys. So a vehicle like this one is going to get abused and handled roughly with every ride. So I was very happy to see that the Razor Dune Buggy has a very solid and rugged tubular steel frame. Your kids will have a hard time damaging this heavy duty 65 lb frame. At that weight, the frame also helps to keep the vehicle upright during tight turns. The design of the frame is sort of a half roll cage design that keeps your kid from falling out during those turns but also lets them get in and out of the driver’s seat easily. The quality of the construction here is very impressive and one of the best I’ve seen in a child’s electric vehicle. Many go karts and 4 wheelers have cheap plastic frames that crack after so many hours of playtime. This frame is going to stand up to just about anything. The quality here is something that you normally see in more expensive dune racers.

Razor Dune Buggy Design

When it comes to design, what Razor delivers for kids can be hit or miss. For instance, some of their electric scooters are just plain ugly, while others are very sleek and modern. In this case, the  Razor Dune Buggy is very well designed. It has the style of the classic dune buggies or go-karts that you know and love and the shape seats your child comfortably. It’s very minimal in design, but every part here looks good and is quality made.  It’s a ride that is low to the ground and heavy enough that the large 8-inch pneumatic tires hug the terrain nicely no matter if it is sand, grass, rocks or when zipping across the driveway. Paying special attention to safety with this model, they have also included a safety flag so that this vehicle is more easily seen. That not only helps other vehicles see it more clearly, but it also helps parents to easily see where their child is at all times. Both the speed throttle and rear disc brakes are easily accessible on the steering wheel as well. It also has quality plate floorboards. Considering all of these design factors, I have to say that I was really impressed by how much thought went into safety. This is probably the safest buggy for kids I have seen for this age group, so it gets extra points for that. If you feel like the speed is too fast for your kid, you can adjust the top speed by using the supplied Allen wrench. This lets you limit the speed and adjust braking controls.  Then when they are ready for higher speeds, you can adjust it again to speed things up. It’s nice being able to have variable speed in this way. I kind of wish it had a remote control so that you could set features like this more easily, but it’s pretty quick to do it with the Allen wrench anyway.

How Powerful Is The Razor Dune Buggy?

The 350 W engine provides plenty of power for your child’s off-road adventures, with a top speed of 10 miles per hour. That’s plenty of speed for any daredevil, but not so fast that it puts them in serious danger. It performs like a champ on asphalt, grass, gravel and other terrains. Even with kids riding it in wet conditions, it didn’t seem to slow it down. The throttle responds well and the brakes are also very responsive so that you can be sure the vehicle will stop when you need it to stop. Forget kids dirt bikes and other gas-powered vehicles. This is a ride that’s perfect for kids and teens. A great little dirt rocket.

Battery Life

When you first get your Razor Electric Dune Buggy you will have to charge it for a longer period the first time since it has been sitting on the warehouse shelf. Razor recommends an 18 hour charge time for this first charge. Other models have a shorter initial charge time, like 12 hours, so this was my only real gripe about this model. That way your battery will be fully charged and ready to go after that. Each battery charging will give you about an hour of run time and it takes about 5 hours to fully charge the batteries at that point. That’s a better run time than many competitors, which usually give you about 40 minutes or so. Again, it’s beating the competition’s ride on toys in that department. This youth ATV operates on a 24V rechargeable battery system that consists of two 12V batteries.

Bottom Line and Razor Dune Buggy Review Wrap Up

This kids electric dune buggy is worth every penny. Razor has built another quality kids vehicle in this 4 wheeler. It’s very similar to the Razor Ground Force model. Parents will appreciate the extra attention to safety thanks to key features like the safety flag, a solid steel frame, seat belt and a respectable speed of 10 miles per hour. Your kids will love how it performs. This is an electric toy that will keep them outdoors and away from video games. Visually, the design looks great, but more importantly, it is designed to make sure that your kids have a fun time and don’t get hurt. This dune buggy’s best features are a powerful motor, large pneumatic tires, comfortable padded bucket seat,  thumb trigger accelerator, and a hand-operated rear disk braking system. The end result of all of these features is a 4 wheeler that that is comfortable for your child and easy to use.  It’s a great performer on nearly any terrain with those large knobby tires and if you have flat terrain they will speed around even faster. Between the low center of gravity and that half roll cage, it is very unlikely that your child will fall out, even when taking tight turns. The tires and the terrain seem to work together in fact, so it’s a fun ride. With a weight limit of 120 pounds, some older kids can ride too. If you are looking for a special gift for your kid and are considering a dune buggy type racer, you can’t go wrong with this one. It’s one of the best karts for kids out there and it’s a great first vehicle. After they master this they will want to move up to a Razor Dirt Quad.

Razor Dune Buggy Review was first published on GadgetReview on Tech

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Razor Dune Buggy Review

So your child wants to get out into nature and away from video games by riding a 4 wheeler. That’s a victory for parents in this day and age. But as a parent (aka grown adult) it virtually impossible for you to test a kid’s or children’s sized dune buddy yourself. It also ain’t easy finding test models so that your kid can try them all out. So that’s why you’re here. You and your child are looking at the battery-powered Razor Dune Buggy, but you have a ton of questions. I’m here to answer them with this review since I recently teamed up with nephew and tested this ride-on toy thoroughly. I’m also too big to test this one myself, so I enlisted the help of a young relative, and together we put this battery operated vehicle through its paces. He was more than happy to help out and I scored some sweet uncle-points because who else has an uncle that says, “Okay kid, get in this awesome 4-wheeler so we can have fun and test it out!” Yeah, I’m awesome like that.

Is the Razor Dune Buggy One of the Best Dune Buggies or a Buggy Bud?

The good news is that the Razor Dune Buggy is a fun and more importantly SAFE dune buggy that is easy to ride and has some great features. Your child will be safe thanks to: Key Features

A built-in safety belt

A speed of only 10 mph

And a durable tubular steel frame.

Some of the Razor Dune Buggy’s features include:

Powerful 350 W motor

10 mph maximum speed

8-inch knobby pneumatic tires

Strong tubular steel frame

Padded bucket seat with a seatbelt

Hand throttle and brake controls

Adjustable speed

120-pound weight limit

Safety flag

Age range of 8 and older

The manufacturer, Razor is a top-selling brand that makes hoverboards, scooters and even mini ATVs for kids. They have a reputation for making fun vehicles that are safe, durable and loved by kids everywhere. They make scooters like the Razor e100 and Razor e200. Some of their coolest dune buggies include the Force Drifter and Ground Force Drifter. So how does this dune buggy go kart stack up? Is it up to their usual quality? Read on for our Razor dune buggy review and buying guide. Pros:

Durable Steel Frame

Terrain Following Rear Suspension

Powerful 350watt Electric Motor

Cons:

Charge Time Is 5 Hours

Ground Clearance Is A Bit Too Low

Low Max Speed

Razor Dune Buggy Build Quality

Let’s be honest, kids are not gentle with their toys. So a vehicle like this one is going to get abused and handled roughly with every ride. So I was very happy to see that the Razor Dune Buggy has a very solid and rugged tubular steel frame. Your kids will have a hard time damaging this heavy duty 65 lb frame. At that weight, the frame also helps to keep the vehicle upright during tight turns. The design of the frame is sort of a half roll cage design that keeps your kid from falling out during those turns but also lets them get in and out of the driver’s seat easily. The quality of the construction here is very impressive and one of the best I’ve seen in a child’s electric vehicle. Many go karts and 4 wheelers have cheap plastic frames that crack after so many hours of playtime. This frame is going to stand up to just about anything. The quality here is something that you normally see in more expensive dune racers.

Razor Dune Buggy Design

When it comes to design, what Razor delivers for kids can be hit or miss. For instance, some of their electric scooters are just plain ugly, while others are very sleek and modern. In this case, the  Razor Dune Buggy is very well designed. It has the style of the classic dune buggies or go-karts that you know and love and the shape seats your child comfortably. It’s very minimal in design, but every part here looks good and is quality made.  It’s a ride that is low to the ground and heavy enough that the large 8-inch pneumatic tires hug the terrain nicely no matter if it is sand, grass, rocks or when zipping across the driveway. Paying special attention to safety with this model, they have also included a safety flag so that this vehicle is more easily seen. That not only helps other vehicles see it more clearly, but it also helps parents to easily see where their child is at all times. Both the speed throttle and rear disc brakes are easily accessible on the steering wheel as well. It also has quality plate floorboards. Considering all of these design factors, I have to say that I was really impressed by how much thought went into safety. This is probably the safest buggy for kids I have seen for this age group, so it gets extra points for that. If you feel like the speed is too fast for your kid, you can adjust the top speed by using the supplied Allen wrench. This lets you limit the speed and adjust braking controls.  Then when they are ready for higher speeds, you can adjust it again to speed things up. It’s nice being able to have variable speed in this way. I kind of wish it had a remote control so that you could set features like this more easily, but it’s pretty quick to do it with the Allen wrench anyway.

How Powerful Is The Razor Dune Buggy?

The 350 W engine provides plenty of power for your child’s off-road adventures, with a top speed of 10 miles per hour. That’s plenty of speed for any daredevil, but not so fast that it puts them in serious danger. It performs like a champ on asphalt, grass, gravel and other terrains. Even with kids riding it in wet conditions, it didn’t seem to slow it down. The throttle responds well and the brakes are also very responsive so that you can be sure the vehicle will stop when you need it to stop. Forget kids dirt bikes and other gas-powered vehicles. This is a ride that’s perfect for kids and teens. A great little dirt rocket.

Battery Life

When you first get your Razor Electric Dune Buggy you will have to charge it for a longer period the first time since it has been sitting on the warehouse shelf. Razor recommends an 18 hour charge time for this first charge. Other models have a shorter initial charge time, like 12 hours, so this was my only real gripe about this model. That way your battery will be fully charged and ready to go after that. Each battery charging will give you about an hour of run time and it takes about 5 hours to fully charge the batteries at that point. That’s a better run time than many competitors, which usually give you about 40 minutes or so. Again, it’s beating the competition’s ride on toys in that department. This youth ATV operates on a 24V rechargeable battery system that consists of two 12V batteries.

Bottom Line and Razor Dune Buggy Review Wrap Up

This kids electric dune buggy is worth every penny. Razor has built another quality kids vehicle in this 4 wheeler. It’s very similar to the Razor Ground Force model. Parents will appreciate the extra attention to safety thanks to key features like the safety flag, a solid steel frame, seat belt and a respectable speed of 10 miles per hour. Your kids will love how it performs. This is an electric toy that will keep them outdoors and away from video games. Visually, the design looks great, but more importantly, it is designed to make sure that your kids have a fun time and don’t get hurt. This dune buggy’s best features are a powerful motor, large pneumatic tires, comfortable padded bucket seat,  thumb trigger accelerator, and a hand-operated rear disk braking system. The end result of all of these features is a 4 wheeler that that is comfortable for your child and easy to use.  It’s a great performer on nearly any terrain with those large knobby tires and if you have flat terrain they will speed around even faster. Between the low center of gravity and that half roll cage, it is very unlikely that your child will fall out, even when taking tight turns. The tires and the terrain seem to work together in fact, so it’s a fun ride. With a weight limit of 120 pounds, some older kids can ride too. If you are looking for a special gift for your kid and are considering a dune buggy type racer, you can’t go wrong with this one. It’s one of the best karts for kids out there and it’s a great first vehicle. After they master this they will want to move up to a Razor Dirt Quad.

Razor Dune Buggy Review was first published on GadgetReview on Tech

Razor Dune Buggy Review published first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/ Razor Dune Buggy Review posted first on http://www.gadgetreview.com/