https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/100909-la...
It's a paid ad for LEGO, not a serious record.
Guiness has always been a half-commercial silly enterprise. It's literally founded by a beer brand to resolve pub trivia arguments.
They're not claiming to be the largest automotive tire manufacturer.
But structurally they make real tires, as opposed to some other brands, which might produce solid plastic wheels.
They're not pressurized, but neither are e.g. https://crocodiletires.com
If you're going to claim that toys don't count, that's going to get quite fuzzy. Some RC model tires are larger than those on some "real" vehicles.
Because they don’t make the largest tires?
(Joke)
This is clearly not true. All it takes is to acknowledge that Lego produces tires (which it does), check how many they produce per time period (which they provided) l, and compare with other statistics from other tire producers (which they do).
At best, you can claim that your personal definition of what a tire is doesn't match Lego's.
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/100909-la...
Think of all the makes of tyre you know. Who would make the most tyres each year? The simple answer is Lego! Since 2006, Lego makes around 306 million rubber tyres each year for its construction kit toys. In 2010, this number was topped at 381 million tyres, easily beating all other tyre manufacturers. Even though Lego products are unlikely to fit an everyday car, they do fit all descriptions of a standard tyre, albeit of the solid rubber variety. Even the rubber compound used for the Lego products would not be out of place on a domestic car.
"Largest tire manufacturer" could reasonably be interpreted to mean:
* Largest company that manufactures tires
* Company that produces the most tires by mass/weight/volume
* Company that produces the most tires by number of tires
If you read the record, it's clear they mean the latter interpretation. By that interpretation, it seems like LEGO clearly is the winner.
The things they make are tires: They are rubber-like and go around wheels. There is no rule anywhere on Earth that says tires must not be on toys.
Oh, those are the same Guinness! I always wondered.
No it is, in actuality, a marketing organization. They make all their money selling records. Their business is contracting with companies to come up with a marketable record, and then "observing" the client breaking that record, and then publishing that record. It's no different than those "award" companies that exist only to make up new awards to give companies.
It's the same as when JD power gave Chevy an award for "Highest Initial Quality", as if there is any customer value to a car that starts the best and immediately degrades.
I don't know much about solar panels, but just looking up sunshine hours it seems Virginia has a similar amount as Texas? And more than double as Billund.
My understanding is the US:
1. Is more politically, economically, and frankly physically secure than Mexico.
2. Has cheaper energy
3. Has a better-trained manufacturing workforce for the kinds of machine Lego is gonna use.
I mean look at the millennium falcon.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/millennium-falcon-75192
https://i.imgur.com/vsxVnSJ.png
ages 16+
When I think of fancy lego, I think of something like this https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/lego-medium-creative-bric... because it has wheels and stuff, not just bricks.
I would have imagined "regular" lego was just different sizes of bricks, not even a sloped "roof" brick or wheels.
Also I think "made in USA" might help sales in the US and at the very least calms investors?
LEGO Group A/S remains privately held by the family that started it in Denmark.
* Does the cheaper energy come into play with such a large onsite solar system?
* (From the point of view of a manufacturing company opening operations in the us) Does the US currently have a surplus of well trained manufacturing workers? I hear a lot of factory management/executives still complaining that the skilled labor they need just doesn't exist.
2. That's probably true, but the US labour market is simultaneously huge, flexible, and well-educated. That gives it an advantage over most competitors.
If you put people in a situation where they can only produce crap, then that's what you'll get.
Legos are made out of petroleum
If the question was "what are Lego made of?" then this answer would at least make sense, but that's not what the question was.
For what it's worth, Lego has used a lot of different materials over the years, and not all of them have been petroleum based. To be fair, the majority of their new products are made from petroleum based plastics, including ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene), polypropylene, MABS (Methyl Methacrylate-Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene), PA (Polyamide, aka, nylon), POM (Polyoxymethylene), PE (Polyethylene), MTPO (Metallocene Thermoplastic Polyolefin), SEBS (Styrene-Ethylene-Butylene-Styrene, the material used for "rubber" tires and similar), and PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate).
There are efforts being made towards replacing ABS with recycled PET. Some kits may already use recycled PET.
In Mexico you would be lucky to make $5/hour.
If this lets them source much of the plastic locally, it will save on millions of boxes being shipped across the ocean. That’s a huge reduction in carbon, even if the local manufacturing costs a bit more.
I don't imagine this will have much impact on oil as the solar is offsetting electricity from coal/gas/nuclear/etc.
No mention of exporting kWh during the summer days and importing during winter nights?
Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.
Almost certainly a great deal of this.
But
> > No offsets shenanigans.
Means they're not entering some shady arrangement with someone else that is doing green things and doing accounting magic to claim it's about the same. It's much harder to play games when you're talking about netting zero on-site.
> Still good as every kWh of solar is a kWh of gas not burnt.
This is becoming much less true in many places with a lot of solar, e.g. California.
The lowest I see in thee last week was 3.1GW of natural gas for CISO. Similar amount to the lowest gas usage last June and July (2.7GW I think on June 19)
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
Because the grid is, fundamentally, still storage-starved (though that's been improving in recent years), even with export the CA energy companies run into grid over-saturation problems on clear, sunny days. Eventually losses catch up with you pushing the power geographically far enough; they couldn't, for example, power the entire United States off of enough California solar.
So I naively suspect the issue is either exporting just saturates the adjacent grids too or other power companies are loathe to crash their prices by letting their grids saturate and therefore use whatever restrictions are allowed against exporting to keep CA's surplus off their grids.
Maybe there are local bottlenecks inside the CISO network, but that's a very separate problem.
Also a gas turbine core that's spinning can modulate power in seconds, unlike one that has to first be brought up to speed with external power (even if that's from batteries, or an on-site diesel (like AFAIK in the case of the black start capability of the downtown power plant in Wuppertal Barmen)).
So it seems to me like you could power the US off california solar if they had enough.
The longest curently runing line is over 2500km, which from Los Angeles would cover the entirety of 17 states as well as cities like Vancouver, Calgary and even Winnipeg
There are four: Xingu-Estreito and Xingu-Rio for the Belo Monte dam, and the two parallel Rio Madeira lines for the Santo Antônio and Jirau dams on the Madeira river. They all take large amounts of hydroelectric power from the sparsely populated North region to the densely populated Southeast region. (There are also the two parallel Itaipu HVDC lines, but they're shorter than 1200 miles.)
Which day, specifically, had zero natural gas generation?
They've had their ups and downs over the years but the value add on 1 KG of ABS to sell for >> $200 is such that the plastic bit is almost an afterthought. Without the StarWars franchise and discovering adults rather than kids as a market Lego would be in an entirely different position today.
Based on prices I've seen shopping for my nephews they seem to be a luxury brand now that can afford to. Lots of elaborate and expensive sets sold for $50-200. In my day they were closer to plain bricks.
I think there were jet packs in the 1970s, too. But I never knew anyone who owned one.
But that's still 30 years ago so Lego has been fancy pieces and custom kits for a couple generations of kids now.
You can get a 790 piece big box of Lego brand plastic building blocks on Amazon for $35. These types of collections tend to end up in yard sells, or passed around extended families because they last longer than a single childhood. The none-fancy Lego branded blocks still exist, and are still a common part of childhood in America. Lego just doesn't have to market them as hard, and the sale volume is naturally lower.
Then when you get bored with the specialty model as-it-is, the pieces go in the bins and you remix them with everything else :)
This [1] from LEGO Movie specifically plays on the 1980's space sets, for example, and I personally had quite a few of these [2] sets in the early 80's.
[1] https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/benny-s-space-squad-70841
[2] http://www.doubledumbassonyou.com/2016/02/19/lets-enjoy-a-lo...
> If there’s one big gripe common among brickheads, it’s that the prices of LEGO sets are quite lofty (plus maybe not enough spaceships). But two disparate people interested in the plastique fantastique eschewed conjecture in favor of hard data, and found that LEGO prices scale linearly with piece count, and that on average, prices of sets have actually remained constant over the last couple of decades.
https://nerdist.com/article/notoriously-expensive-lego-price...
But LEGO has always favoured pieces that even when they look very specific usually have a significant level of reusability in other contexts. Hence "pointless" pieces that aren't actually pointless because their appearance is sufficiently generic.
E.g. you can still buy loose bricks from LEGO, so can make it as simple as you like. If you want basic stuff packaged up, the LEGO Classic line has sets starting very small that consists of a batch of bricks and a small set of themed special parts. On the UK site at least they also have more than 500 sets under 20 GBP/25 USD (you can search by price) including a number under 10 GBP / $12, but the majority of these sets will be full of special parts simply because there's little point in packaging up the same small selection of basic bricks in umpteen different sets.
Overall, the price per piece of LEGO varies greatly by set (average per category of set varies from less than 20 cents to nearly 2 dollars per piece) because of different weighting of types of pieces, but the inflation adjusted cost of the basic/cheapest pieces have remained consistently stable [1]
While Legoland still exists, it's now a license and the parks owned by a separate company
I appreciate no offset shenanigans but did they factor in the fact that their product is made out of petroleum?
Not breaking down in landfill doesn't really matter as long as it doesn't leech pollutants into the water table or somesuch.
I work with solar, not directly but we turn investor money into solar plants, and part of that is getting the most money out of them as possible. The amount of sun obviously matters, but the temperature matters more. The hotter it gets the less efficient the solarpanels become at generating electricty.
The efficiency starts dropping by around 0.5% for every degree celcius above 25 degrees celcius. In hotter climates, you can build solarplants differently, similarly to the one in that james bond movie I believe, not too sure as we don't do that, and I'm obviously not into the engineering part. I mean, I've read the manual of some solarinverters, but that was to get data out of them. Aside from that, solarplanes do actually generate power on cloudy days, not as much, but the only thing that really stop them is snow. The coolest thing about solar, is that it's very predictable. We can basically forecast our budgets for decades to come, because we know exactly how much energy we're going to be producing each month, and with the advances in storage, you'll soon be capable of storing excess power for nights.
Anyway, areas with 10-35 degree celcius are often better suited for solar power than hotter areas with more sun. That's not to say you shouldn't build solar in hot areas, but if you're planning where to put your solar powered factory down, you're likely going to take that into account. Along with a range of other things. I'd wager that logistics and taxes were more important for Lego.
- Lego operates multiple $1B+ factories around the world - they are not just a design and marketing company
- 1400 manufacturing jobs in Virginia expected - not just an automated thing. Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Particularly compared to MX
- 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No offsets shenanigans. Oil prices might be too high today if this is about to happen to most new factories in the world.