bearings

The grooves they put in the races of these bearings will act as stress concentrators and accelerate fatigue failure compared to ungrooved bearings.

What's the safest and best way to get my bearings and jump into a dev job?

Piston efficiency is basically limited by leakage round the seals and friction on the bearings.

That does away with bearings by using a maglev train that stores 20GWh of energy.

It needs bearings, but they don't have to move quickly or be particularly low friction.

Turns out re-packing the bearings with new grease fixed the problems, even though the wheels didn't free spin nearly as long.

However bearings have to live in the real world, where materials are ductile or friable.

The defining features of the hyperloop are air bearings and a partially evacuated tube.

And it gets crazier still: some parts will have embedded metal or other plastic parts such as bearings or threaded screw inserts.

Second time, the motor bearings failed, and the unit was squeaking like crazy.

You let them dissipate and design for the deflection (e.g., at the bearings and abutments), rather than the stress (buckling/tensile) in the beam.

Isn't another purpose of the grease to stop the ball bearings from rusting?

Modern, decent quality ball bearings have a high chrome content (not quite "stainless steel") and don't rust so easily.

If your air bearings are say 3 feet long each and divided into 10 sections internally which are fed through orifices so that no one section can rob all the pressurized air flow then you're never going to lose more than 10% of your bearing force and you should be able to glide right over these 1/2" gaps with no problems.

This can be extrapolated to say "the community which uses a language should not have any bearings on your decision to use that language", which to me is crazy if only for pragmatic reasons -- a strong, welcoming community has tons of observably positive effects on my experience with a language (between docs, third-party libraries, SO/IRC presence, etc.