* Where time and conditions permit, move your boat out to
sea to a depth of at least 180 feet.
* If at sea avoid entering shallow water, harbors,
marinas, bays, and inlets to avoid floating and
submerged debris and strong currents.
Are you familiar with the concept of "pricing ladders"? The point of the entry level product is not to simply be "the economy model", it's to be feature deficient in just the right way to make you take a "step up" the ladder to the next model.
What I've observed is that Apple does this by targeting the base model with a storage option that's just below what's probably the sweet spot for price / usefulness in the current market. You'll likely be just frustrated enough to take the step up that ladder.
They do this trick with RAM/disk configs for all their product lines. This basically means that any useful config is relatively expensive, and I would never recommend their entry-level models to anyone.
There are many well intentioned regulations that end up restricting the housing supply by making it more expensive to build. Some of them definitely sound good (and are good?), but collectively have done a lot of bad.
Note the important point here that these don’t “stop building” but rather simply make it more expensive or more time consuming. Increased time is essentially equivalent to increased cost since you must pay lawyers and employees and so forth as time increases.
- minimum parking requirements
- single family zoning restrictions
- height restrictions
- environmental reviews
- historical preservation review
- local input on many/most decisions
There is a whole universe of stuff written around this topic. You can Google around for it with the topic of “YIMBY” or “housing abundance” or similar.
What is most interesting to me about automation in the restaurant industry, is its almost complete absence in the United States.
If—as I understand it—labor costs dominate the cost structure of all restaurants, then why isn’t the average restaurant already mostly robots?
Is it really a technology issue? We haven’t been able to
build a burger making robot until today? Seems unlikely.
Is it financial? The capital deployable to build a single restaurant can’t cover the initial costs of the robot? Seems like a McDonalds could spread the costs over thousands of restaurants.
Wages for fast food workers compared to those of the people ordering the food.
In most countries the wage spread between minimum wage and average wage is a lot lower than the one in the US. It makes no sense to automate something that your customers are happy to pay for.
Can you explain a bit more about the difference between the anisotropic and isotopic nature of these different zones?
Are both of these zones “solid” states of matter? Or does our intuition about states of matter not really work for materials at these exotic temperatures and pressures?
I had a buddy who built a solar e-bike for Burning Man; it had a sort-of roof on top, so it had room for something like four of those flexible 100 watt solar panels[1].
He told me his biggest build-regret was the solar panels. Mounting the solar panels on the bike makes everything much more complicated—which means it's more expensive and more delicate. And even if it doesn't shake itself apart, you're constantly thinking about where and how you're parking it.
The right solution for solar powered biking is to keep the solar panels off the bike, fixed in place, facing the right direction. Then you can use lots of cheap, heavy panels, and just plug the damn bike in when you get home.
Unless you're off the grid, is there any use case for the solar panel you linked?
It costs $90, not including the protection circuitry.
Even if you pay a lot for electricity (e.g. $0.35 per kWh, like in PG&E service regions), you'd need to be drawing 100W for 7 hours per day, for 365 days, before you break even.
I guess realistically you're more likely to break even after 2 years? Do these small panels 'wear out' over time, or will they work for several years?
With the range of cargo ebikes it isn't hard to get off grid. Riding a century - 100 miles (200km) - is regular achievement for normal bikes - not e-bikes. Most ebikes only have a range of 40 miles, so just the ability to get 50 miles by charging while riding can be useful. If you go camping, solar puts a campground that if more than 20 miles from you in range: so long as you can recharge while at the campground for a few days you can get back home again.
Note that none of the above is about saving money. Other than indirectly because it lets you use a bike for trips that otherwise would require a car, and cars cost a lot more money to own. The above are also uses that I have for an ebike (I don't have one, but those are potential uses making me interested in one), and solar would help make it work out.
Taking an ebike farther than the batteries range should be considered impossible. While it is possible to ride on a dead battery, the effort isn't worth it. Thus a regular bike has more range than an ebike.
Ultimately it's a semiconductor, so it's affected by the same aging processes that transistors and LEDs undergo. Actually, LEDs and solar cells are physically the same component, just designed for opposite use cases - much like motors and generators.
You can reasonably expect it to lose less than 1% of original efficiency a year, so they should last decades.
E-Bike touring would be an excellent use case for this. A lot of people would love to bike tour but don't have the physical ability. I have a friend who was touring on an E-Bike because it made hauling more stuff easier and he would just recharge at each stop. A solar panel would have made a huge difference.
Solar panels don't really wear out like that. It's possible that severe hail may damage these flexible, less well protected cells but you can easily expect well over a decade out of them. Most residential systems are rated for 25-30 years but can realistically last longer.
Most residential systems have a warranty for 25 years. The manufacturer guarantees that there is no significant degradation for that time. That probably means that they last a lot longer than that.
That rad power bike in the article is already quite shitty with the high cargo position compared to a more sensible approach to put cargo in a front bed.
This bike seems to have been designed to carry kids at the bike, not haul stuff.
That's a bit negative. Like you say, better at carrying kids than stuff (which is how I use mine), but that doesn't make it "quite shitty".
I own this bike: it's very good at carrying kids, pretty good at carrying stuff, and exceptionally good value. Rad has been shrinking the back wheel to lower cargo position as iterations progress, which is nice.
They make a front rack for it as well. But it isn't a bakfiets. But it's also about 1/4 the price.
I've owned a RadCity before and it wasn't shitty at all. The dang thing is still running after 7k miles of rough treatment and crashes. The only problem I really had is with the spoke pattern on the drive wheels. They used way too thick spokes that didn't like being bent at such a sharp angle.
Seems weird.. you get payed $39/hour in your first year.. then jump all the way up to $239/hour in your second year and never really get a raise beyond that?
The link there is specifically UPS, which is union.
I guess it is probably the case that guys with a couple years experience are doing about the same work as guys with 10 years (plane smoothly and safely goes from A to B).
It may be true, but I would expect this sort of waste is a drop in the bucket -- drop in the swimming pool, even -- compared to all the waste going on over the rest of the planet during the same time period.
That's not to say we shouldn't avoid waste, but this flight was a pretty momentous occasion (final delivery flight of a 747), and I think it's appropriate to mark that occasion in some unique manner. Burning a bunch of extra jet fuel doesn't seem all that inappropriate, especially considering the total amount of jet fuel burned in a given day.
That's pretty close. It could be a good chance to educate people, perhaps, without turning it into a buzzkill. "This plane burned 27 tons of fuel for that pretty pattern in the sky, but if that sounds like a lot of fuel just wait until you find out that planes burn a million tons every day!"
While that's true that no individual action matters, it's also true that our individual actions taken as a whole has an impact on the world, and because of that, we must treat individual actions as though they had the impact of collective actions.
Collective individuals have simply no way of affecting the environment in any major way simply by collective behavior change. The only thing that will change things is positive policies that encourage good behavior through positive methods.
For example by making electric vehicles attractive Tesla did more for the environment than possibly any single company ever by causing the shift to EVs in the general populace’s psyche.
Alternatively by doing things like banning plastic straws you instead get malicious compliance and dislike for the policies. That will never change things in a positive direction in the long term.
Individuals who can do things that will change the behavior of others through positive reinforcement can change things or by going to work at a company that was started with one of those efforts in mind. For example one of the biggest impact things an individual could do right now for climate change is to figure out a way to make a concrete that’s cheaper than concrete but not made in the method that releases CO2 and start a business out of it.
My only point was about _collective_ behavior change that is often advertised as a way to stop climate change that is advertised by many. I think that’s completely pointless and impossible. For example I do nothing to conserve anything in my day to day actions other than not wasting money or time. So if you can make CO2 reduction possibly simply by saving money and time then it’ll happen automatically.
Also I’m not so pessimistic about the current direction as you. We’re headed for a 3 degrees C change in temperature which isn’t going to have the most disastrous impacts that could have happened. There’s still also a lot of emerging tech that could play out and reduce those predictions further.
Does that napkin math subtract the cost of the same delivery flight but without the stunt?
I didn't read about the flight but I assume that delivery was happening anyway, with or without the stunt. I am guessing it took an hour or two extra, so the fuel and pilot salary cost should only be what was extra in addition to the regular flight amount?
> My napkin math seems to indicate this couldn't possibly cost Boeing more than $10-20k? Pretty small potatoes to such a large company.
Yeah they were losing billions through criminal negligence and delayed deliveries of the 737 Max, so a couple of tens of thousands for some well needed good PR is nothing. This is probably the first bit of it for multiple years now, with all the delays in the 777X, assembly quality issues of 787, etc.
That link was... an interesting read. I'd say it merits a NSFW tag but it's kind of obvious from the title.
> Pinyan had previously lost the ability to experience certain sensations after a motorcycle accident, and he had begun to seek out increasingly extreme sexual acts
Almost feel bad for the guy if it weren't for the animal cruelty.
But the goal here in setting these prices (from Society’s perspective) is not to maximize Safeway’s profits, but rather to incentive more people taking up carrot farming!
Since we’re fairly confident we need lots of carrots to save the world!
People are so quick to speak for "Society" because, in their minds, they think it trumps all other arguments.
But very few -- if any -- actually know what society needs.
I would say that what Society needs is to ensure a regular supply of carrots at stable prices. It's not to maximize small household carrot farming if it does not align with this goal.
There is no particular reason why solar needs to be on individual rooftops where there is no storage, no ability to make long term commitments, and no mechanism to turn it into a reliable, dependable stream of energy.
But sure, if the same households commit to maintaining their solar panels at an agreed upon capacity, and commit to purchasing enough storage to provide the agreed upon electricity despite the weather, and are able to sign long term contracts with significant financial penalties for failing to deliver the promised quantity of electricity, then yes they can be an electricity supplier to those utilities that need reliable energy suppliers in order to meet their own contractual commitments to energy users.
There's no need for all that red tape. Since there are so many households, the average will be highly predictable, given the weather conditions. Same as with large suppliers.
Battery capacity is something many households may also want to invest in, if the incentives are attractive enough. Again, no need for long term contractual commitments.
> " Since there are so many households, the average will be highly predictable, "
Unfortunately when it's dark in one place, it's also dark elsewhere. When it's cloudy or rainy in one place it's not made up for with extra sun elsewhere. There are also differences across seasons, with less sunlight in the winter, etc. You can average and say a state has, on average, x hours of sunlight in June, but without extremely expensive storage, the sunny days don't end up powering the grid on cloudy days, and solar in the summer doesn't get stored for use in the winter.
Electricity needs to be stable and reliable year round, and every day.
But that's an argument against solar rather than against the notion of retail compensation rather than wholesale for boutique-scale production of solar (which is what the main topic on this subthread seemed to be).
No, it's an argument against solar without storage. Include the storage, include reliability, and you can have solar.
But no one wants to do that because storage is expensive, so they wave their hands and talk about "randomness evening out" or they explain "storage is a solved problem!" and then they draw something on a napkin for you.
Bottom line everyone wants to externalize the cost of storage because it's a difficult and expensive proposition. And so the household with the rooftop solar connected directly to the grid is effectively using the grid as storage, because buying the batteries is -- surprise -- too expensive.
But the electric utilities are saying -- "unreliable power is not very valuable to us, because we need reliable power" -- that is solar plus storage. If you just give us unreliable power, we'll only pay a penny for that, but we'll pay 20 cents for reliable power. And people are getting very angry at this because they think the unreliable and reliable power should have the same price, or that unreliable power is somehow a replacement for reliable power.
Given the amount that I've had to bail them out as a California taxpayer and as a ratepayer, it's absolutely criminal that they're not currently a government-owned company.
* Boat operators,