S201

Anecdotal: I've been quite happy with T-Mobile's coverage for many years now. At least where I'm at they have just as good, if not better, coverage than Verizon does.

The zero API quota on GCP hits close to home for me too. Last year I wanted to write a little script that would use the YouTube API to find video URLs from a particular channel. The details on it aren't important; it was something I would only use locally for personal purposes and did a single API call per day.

After wondering why it kept returning a 401 I finally figured out that the API quota was set to zero out of the box and that I had to fill out some form with a bunch of ridiculous questions like "what will be the impact to your business if your quota is not increased?" Uh, I won't be able to use the API at all because it's currently zero?

The end result was that it took about two weeks of back and forth with Google Support trying to make them understand what I was using the API for before they finally relented and increased the API quota to a non-zero value.

I get that Google is probably somewhat protective of the YouTube API and I'm just some Joe Blow looking to query it for non-revenue purposes, but if I were a business it would have been an insanely terrible experience to get set up with a third-party API.

Compared to every quota increase request on AWS which is either self-serve or something a support ticket handles in a few hours typically.

There are also many studies demonstrating the negative health effects of living within a similar radius to a highway or any other major road, which encompasses most land in every major city. It's not like car emissions are perfectly clean because of unleaded gas and catalytic converters. They're cleaner than before the introduction of those things, but any emissions still carry health impacts so why are we demonizing the comparatively tiny GA fleet here? The only escape from any form of human pollution is to live far out in a rural area, but I'm willing to bet you've made a tradeoff of the convenience and economical benefits of being near a city/some town in exchange for exposure to some degree of pollution.

You have a funny notion of "the 1%." Unless you're in a very low cost of living area $60k in the US is barely scraping by, even $120k/yr in high COL areas like the Bay Area is basically a poverty wage. At large, something like 12% of US households are over $200k/yr. The top 1% of income is considerably higher than that so I have no idea where you're getting $60-120k from unless you're comparing against global incomes, but that's not accounting for local cost of living levels making it an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Maybe you should read a study before citing it:

> On the basis of distance to airport coefficients, children living within 500 m, 1,000 m, or 1,500 m of an airport had average blood lead levels that were 4.4, 3.8, or 2.1% higher, respectively, than other children.

> Based on the geospatial and statistical analysis presented above, lead from avgas may have a small (2.1–4.4%) but significant impact on blood lead levels in children who live in proximity to airports where avgas is used. The magnitude of the estimated effect of living near airports was largest for those children living within 500 m and decreased in a monotonic fashion out to 1,500 m.

2-4% higher doesn't exactly scream environmental crisis to me. Especially when it's limited to an area under a mile from known locations and can be easily avoided if one wishes.

> Although controlling for individual- and group-level confounders attenuated the association between logged blood lead levels and residential proximity to an airport, evidence of a deleterious relationship remained. In the adjusted models, control variables behaved as expected: Relative to being screened in the winter season, children tested in the spring, summer, or fall had increased blood lead levels, on average. Residence in poor and minority neighborhoods was also associated with elevated lead levels. In contrast, recently constructed housing units were associated with decreased mean lead levels.

Interesting how the correlation isn't as strong as one would imply and there's other factors at play too. If you close all of the airports it's not going to drop lead exposure to zero.

So let me re-iterate my original point again: Obviously 4.4% elevated lead levels (in the worst case, ~1,500ft from an airport) isn't something to accept as "this is fine." Instead of taking the burn it down approach, close all airports, ground the GA fleet, and destroy an entire industry, let's get the FAA off their butts and get G100UL rolled out across the board so we can stop this silly argument about a tiny percentage of lead exposure. Which, mind you, is peanuts compared to lead pipes still in use.

> Is it fair that 1 person out of 10 gets to fly while the 9 others will have to pay the same consequences?

This isn't an aviation unique topic. You can replace "fly" in that sentence with countless other activities and the same tradeoff applies as virtually every activity currently involves carbon emissions at some point.

There is a massive difference between an airliner's emissions flying from US to Europe and your local GA pilot cruising to the next town over to get lunch on the weekend though. Does that person need to fly to do that? No, they could drive. But the guy that wants to go cruise around the lake all day on his boat or drive his semi-truck sized RV to go camping for the weekend doesn't need to do either of those activities yet no one here has a moral problem with that.

Alright, here we go yet again with the "leaded gas from GA is going to kill us all!" scare mongering.

First, the GA fleet worldwide uses 500 tons of lead per year. Compared to 5,000,000 tons when leaded car gas was in use. That's a 99% reduction in lead pollution, so let's not be so dramatic and claim that flying a piston GA plane is "evil" and that we're all going to die from it and how it's poisoning low income communities in particular. Last I checked there are many middle and upper middle class neighborhoods that exist near regional airports. I know this all too well because those are the same NIMBYs that move in next to an airport that has existed there for the past century and then try to close it because of noise complaints.

Second, since I'm sure you don't know, most GA planes can fly perfectly fine on unleaded gas. Some engines are diesel and some burn Jet A (the same as airliners), none of which have lead. Some small trainer aircraft are electric now too.

Third, unleaded G100UL exists, is certified, and is actively being rolled out. If only we could get the FAA to stop doing what they always do, which is move as slow as glaciers about anything related to GA. I'm not going to defend leaded gas, we all want to see it gone if for nothing else than to take away this ridiculous talking point from the ignorant. It should have been done 50 years ago if the FAA wasn't boneheaded, but I'm also not going to loose sleep over burning a minuscule amount of lead when natural lead sources and lead pipes/paint still exist in the world.

By the way, my home water source is a well 250ft from the end of a runway. I've had lab tests run on it for lead and it's well below the EPA limit. I put my health where my mouth is, I look forward to the day when it's all unleaded fuel being burned but until then it's not something that concerns me.

> is asking the world’s 1% to give up their cessnas really too much

I wish this "only the 1% fly planes" crap would stop already. Yes, GA isn't exactly cheap, but there are many upper middle class families with RVs, boats, trucks, and vacation homes that are more expensive than a shitbox 1970's Cessna is and no one whines about how it's only the 1% that enjoy those pursuits. Not to mention the many more people in partnerships and flying clubs to split the fixed costs across multiple people.

The short of it is that GA is an expensive hobby just as many other upper middle class hobbies are, but an accessible one for many more than the 1%. The people that proclaim how it's only the ultra rich who enjoy aviation are admitting that they know absolutely nothing about the actual general aviation community.

Pretty much, yeah. And from my personal experience, uship is useless. Lots of independent people that charge too much due to small economies of scale (one guy with a goose-neck truck vs. a car carrier). The few times I've had to ship a vehicle cross country I've wasted time on uship before going back to a traditional broker and letting them handle it for less money and less hassle. It's still annoying dealing with the salespeople, but if you're good at playing that game you can at least use the usual negotiation tactics to get an even lower price.

In this case you would likely do a 15 year term loan. The previous comment is misleading or incorrect in stating that you have to do a new 30 year loan always when refinancing.

So in other words, more clickbait doomer-ism titles. It's disappointing to see this type of junk "journalism" be submitted to, and upvoted on, HN.

Wonderful! With investment into SMRs hopefully the technology can mature and achieve the economies of scale needed to be cost competitive for replacing oil and gas. We need all the investment we can get into next gen nuclear in order to decarbonize at scale as quickly as possible in coordination with solar & wind.

> I was a skeptic for years, as it was based on Atom/Electron, which I found really sluggish, and it was Microsoft.

This pretty much still sums it up for me.

> Apple seems to be the only sensible alternative.

My Arch box has never once tried to display an ad to me, or coerce me to use any particular piece of software for that matter.

> For 24/7/365/30 constant airborne capabilities?

I'm not saying it's necessary (or even a good idea, see the "accidents" section in the linked to article), but it also wouldn't be the first time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome

Cool, I'm in the Seattle area and didn't know of that one either. Do you have any background on it? I run a similar website to catalog all current airports, but also collect info on closed airports for historical purposes. I added a page for it here: https://pirep.io/airports/UNM96. If there's any info to document on it that would be wonderful.

> In before “how do we believe you?”

A company trying to weasel out of its warranty obligations is hardly something I'd cast doubt on anymore (unfortunately).

If society agrees that eating during workplace meetings is acceptable, then so be it. My point was that "it's a biological need therefore it's acceptable" isn't an excuse to use for eating in a meeting (working lunches excluded as all participants understand the intention of those).

People also gotta shit. Should I do a Zoom call while on the toilet?

It's a matter of where is your attention. If you're eating you're not fully focused on the other participant you're interacting with and not being fully present for them is rude.

Meanwhile I'm 10 miles from a city of 100k people and I have no cellular service at all. Trees suck for phone signals.

For what it's worth, I only buy Android phones that have unlockable bootloaders and I can root so that ultimately I have control over my own device.

But yes, I agree on how letting Apple and Google assert a level of control unparalleled in the history of computing has been a massive step backwards for our industry and consumers in general.

> The single biggest deficiency of Kagi is Apple’s exclusive control over the list of selectable default search providers in iOS Safari.

Seems like a deficiency of Apple products to me. I know it's beating a dead horse, but this is what happens when people willingly buy into a closed system they have no control over.

Right, because there's surely no scientist in the US interested in pursing something like this as well. Generalize much? Keep riding that "US sucks, China good" train for absolutely no reason.

Is there anything left to really "figure out" about carbon capture? The tech works, it's just too expensive. Given a sufficient amount of cheap enough energy it could be scaled up as far as I understand.

As a layperson, it's just one more reason I so wish we'd invest in nuclear. Nuclear powered DAC plants might be the only way to scale it fast enough. Sure, it would still be expensive, but that's much cheaper than not massively reducing CO2 in the atmosphere.

True, but home prices are also much higher than in the past partly thanks to that long period of low interest rates. Taking on these huge loans with corresponding (comparatively) high rates is a different ballgame than it was in the past.

You're missing a huge difference here: A captcha works on top of the existing web. I can use it on any platform to prove that I am a human. Whereas the proposal/implementation here effectively locks out any platform not explicitly allowed by the website operators. That is a huge blow to anything not from Google/Apple/Microsoft. Open source and any potential new entrants to the market would be dramatically limited if not killed entirely.

As usual, the difference is energy density between hydrocarbon fuels and Li-ion batteries. Power the drone with gas and it becomes a different story. But then you just re-created the helicopter and all the problems which explain why no one is doing helicopter package deliveries.

I don't see why not as long as the Adafruit libraries I used still work on it (or you swap them out with something else). Overall it's a pretty simple project that just reads values from sensors and prints their values over a TCP socket so I'd imagine getting it to run on a different platform than I used would be fairly straightforward.

Yes, I keep mine indoors so I made a small wooden box with a cutout on top covered with a piece of window screen material to allow for airflow inside. I figured I'd leave the enclosure as an exercise for the reader since you'd likely have a different preference for it than I did.

OP did not say that climate change was not a factor. Both of these are contributing factors.

I will second the point about lack of controlled burns and logging absolutely being a problem. Look at photos of western forests from the late 1800s and you'll see that we have far more trees now than a century ago. Here's an example of Yosemite valley: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda.... A century of fire suppression and climate change have proved to be a dangerous combination. One of these is easier to correct though if we could get past the idea that every tree must be saved at all costs.