makewavesnotwar

I love the sentiment, but seriously... who did you think you were building this for? It's absurd to believe you were helping anything other than the big brother character from 1984. Who else would this help? Foreign secret services? Maybe you believed it would help stream line the automation process? Thereby making humans irrelevant? I'd love to hear a legitimate - non-big brother implementation of this. And please don't be so coy as to say this helps automate person to person sales. I can already review all purchases made through big box hardware stores thanks to them identifying me through my credit card number and the email address I associated with it.

So first off, I love buses as a means of transportation and in any situation where biking would be unsafe, I would err on the side of caution and use a bus like you suggest so you know, no judgement here, I think that's cool.

And yeah, not having bike paths makes it a whole different story. Drivers can be very irresponsible regarding the safety of cyclists (especially during inclement weather). I would personally be very weary if I had to bike exclusively on the street. Where I live, I can get pretty much everywhere without touching a single street thanks to all the dedicated multi-use / bike paths. In fact, the reason I purchased a e-bike and decided to try to go car free was the installation of a bike path that parallels the major highway here. But all of the bike paths here are a response to how many people here are cyclists and the dedication of the community to take steps to fight climate change/pollution. Though places like Indiana may never have a good bike system without some sort of federal intervention if they are really that anti-biking, but there are much better places to live if you like to bike. Riding around the Denver/Boulder metro area is an absolute hoot and there are places that are even more bike friendly.

Living in Colorado I bike to commute in both freezing conditions and 100+ degree weather conditions without catching a sweat on my e-bike. I'm not some hyper fit guy, I've got a dad-bod and long hair (along with a beard at the moment) and I generally run warm. But after I settled on trying to use the e-bike I got as my primary means of transportation, I started solving some of the problems you discuss.

For instance during the winter, I wear a black down jacket (with a massive backpack that keeps my back extra toasty), a insulated black balaclava with ski goggles, ski gloves if it's extra cold (otherwise just some simple neoprene gloves), long johns and thick wool socks and to combat the wind I ride with my hands in my jacket pockets (though that's admittedly only possible because of the long open curves of the bike path and I never have to make any surprise emergency stops). You might think that I'd be sweating like crazy in all of that, but you have to remember, with an e-bike, my effort for pedaling is similar to that of riding a beach cruiser down a flat boardwalk with a tailwind regardless of wind, hills or cargo and my layering is generally designed to keep me comfortable. At most I will unzip my coat to ventilate my torso. And when I get to my destination, I usually just stop off at some restroom to slip off my long johns - sometimes I'll also switch my shirt.

Also on the note of snow, while I wouldn't recommend it as it's super sketchy and totally unsafe, I've found that getting around in even a few inches of snow on the ground is weirdly doable with an e-bike if you have it in throttle-only mode. The reason being that you can keep your body still and work on maintaining your balance while letting the motor do all the work. It works so well because you don't have to worry about unpredictable tire slippage causing you to throw your weight. An e-bike tire can slip all it wants and I'm still just going to be standing over my bike in a track stand while maneuvering the front tire. Plus with mountain bike tire, you get better traction on snow or mud so it works even better than my track bike.

During the summer, I wear white UPF rated compression tights under highly breathable hybrid shorts and a UPF t-shirt. I wear white nylon gloves, and a thin moisture wicking white balaclava with sunglasses. Do I look like a kook? Sure. I get a lot of weird looks. But I don't mind, the white outfit not only protects me from sun burns, it increases the evaporative cooling of my sweat as well as reflecting most of the light so my skin isn't really being heated by direct radiation. The result is I can get around quite comfortably regardless of the heat outside. And during the summer, it's even easier to carry an extra shirt or pair of short to switch to into a non-ninja-esque outfit. Plus, despite the weirdo factor, it's at least a little fun to go into a bathroom and come out wearing tights like Superman.

Regarding range, that's one of the cool thing about e-bikes, the one I bought for $1300 and most bikes I've seen over $1200 have a battery that can be unlocked and easily removed so I just bring the charger with me (not much larger than a power brick for a gaming laptop), stick the battery in my bag and then just plug it in where ever I'm stopping. The battery fully charges in 4 hours so assuming I don't need to go more than ~25 miles in a 5 hour window, the e-bike works perfect. (Though I will say that there definitely is a big power output drop off when the battery gets under 30% but I rarely get mine under 40%)

The big thing bikes have over buses is convenience and price. Much like a car, you can anywhere you want and because of the speeds (up to 28 mph for class 3 or 20 mph for class 2 motors) my commutes are generally faster than by bus, and I'd say on average, only 40-50% slower than taking a car which might sound high, but that's usually only an extra 10-15 minutes plus I get the fun of riding a bike around. Not to mention in areas where finding parking is difficult, riding a bike can actually end up being faster than driving.

Buses are definitely part of the equation, which was the point of my original comment, but that shouldn't negate bikes as a preferable means of transportation. Especially if you have a situation in which you can get away with commuting by traditional bike rather than an e-bike. They're the most energy efficient standard mode of transportation available to my knowledge.

https://truecostblog.com/2010/05/27/fuel-efficiency-modes-of...

Yeah, this is why I didn't want to try to make it out to be political despite calling out Republicans, as I do think the false dichotomy of Republican vs Democrat is an attempt to make politics something that the average American [insert spectator sport here] enthusiast can get behind in a good vs evil paradigm and distract from the weird stuff their doing. (Like President Obama signing the Farmer Assurance Provision, otherwise known as the "Monsanto Protection Act" into law while everyone was distracted with the Supreme Court decision in CA on gay-marriage)

And I did mention 2012's NDAA as a big part of the problem, that was all President Obama. He said he needed the power but swore to not use it. To which the logical response was, "Yeah, great, but then why fight for the dystopian clause in the first place and also, what if the person after you is a complete nutter?" Then we got Trump.

Both sides have also engaged in illegal warfare that as you put it, we have all been complicit with. The movement towards a surveillance state seems like an act of war against our own citizens. So no argument here, whether it is the system or the politicians who are corrupted, something is definitely amiss.

Yeah, I'm definitely not saying people should be flying or driving as much as they do (the time-convenience or price of air travel may cause people who wouldn't otherwise travel to go for it - I've definitely hopped a plane back to CA just because Frontier was offering flights for $20 each way). And the use of cost functions in terms of the dollar rather than thermal / fuel efficiency do result in a lot of poor decisions by airlines based on maximizing profit.

But in terms of the financial impact on the 1% and their incentive to try to shape policy, there are a mountain of reasons for them to want people to use cars rather than planes.

For one, there are some ultra rich people that own a bunch of gas stations and the attached convenience store. People flying over middle America hurt their bottom line, and they get to cry foul on the basis of it killing "small town business."

Next, regarding thermal efficiency, planes operate at 35,000 ft (this may be less now as I notice low-cost airlines like Frontier tend to fly lower) but the thing is, the less atmosphere you have above you, the less insulation you have for the heat to be retained inside the atmosphere and the more cooling you have from the cold of space.

Driving on the other hand generates enormous amounts of heat on the surface of the planet. Both with the gasoline burning, but also with the road network.

If you've ever ridden a bike on a hot day and crossed from a concrete to black asphalt, you probably noticed a rather substantial temperature change. Black asphalt, in addition to being yet another way to sell a petroleum product to the masses, is more black than pretty much any naturally occurring substance on the planet and as such generates more heat. And unlike other black substances like volcanic rock, asphalt traps heat (I've definitely had my feet scorched while running across blacktop).

This surface heat generation has a compounding effect for the 1% as America has an unhealthy obsession with climate control and by generating more surface heat, they are essentially selling more coal to power the air conditioning units (places like Arizona where heat is the worst are not even mildly interested in ecologically responsible power generation - the retirees living there by and large support Trump who's putting through legislation like PV tariffs). And any heat is good in the eyes of a coal tycoon because it creates a positive feedback loop - the hotter it gets the more coal they get to burn and the hotter it gets.

Plus the hotter it gets, the more people can make an excuse to drive their air conditioned car to their local whatever rather than riding a bike or walking because "it's just too hot" or "it's unsafe to be out in this heat."

So I guess I'm just saying that I think air vs car travel has a much bigger impact on the bottom-line of the 1%ers than most people account for.

To your point of average BTUs, I think you also have to average out passive BTUs generated by all cross-country roadways against cross-country travelers to get an accurate number and a multiplier effect of coal & gasoline fueled climate control (I assume fuel efficiency with driving goes way down when high temperatures cause people to blast their AC), and also account for added thermal efficiency of air travel in terms of how much of that energy is actually captured by the atmosphere and how much is negated by space cooling.

There's also the point of average environmental cost vs marginal environmental cost to the consumer. The average cost might be really high if my $20 flight was under-booked and there were only 40 passengers onboard. But if that flight were going to happen anyway because the airline had already passed the threshold to justify not cancelling it, then the marginal environmental cost of me flying is low. I'm essentially just a 200 pound weight on a 135,000 pound machine. Fuel efficiency-wise for the plane, I am equivalent to a ~3 lb weight in a 1 ton automobile.

Interesting graph, though also curious that it would appear that the intersection point of the airlines incrementally improving efficiency trend line and the auto's relatively stable trend line appears to have happened around 2000/2001 right around the time of the 9/11 attack. (Not that I'm suggesting anything nefarious, but Ooooooo....)

And agree to disagree on the airlines being the driving force for these measures (or any related measures like the travel ban).

I don't want to make this political as I'm unaffiliated with any political party, but I notice a trend and have a theory.

When Republicans are shaping policy, they tend to target air travel.

The article states that the system gets false denials as much as 1 out of 25 times... 4% is a very high error rate. For DIA alone that would average out to almost ~6,700 false denials a day. And that's not accounting for people who have been miscategorized in the system by the threat detection algorithm. It's another level of worry and potential headache associated with air travel.

Before 9/11, you could arrive at an airport 20 minutes before your flight was supposed to take off and still make it. After 9/11, to get on a plane you had to let the government take a nude picture of you, get a dose of radiation, and expect security lines to take 2 hours or more.

The hassle of flying made the comparative cost of driving places less because there was so much hassle associated with it.

And that's the basis my theory, the government is trying to dissuade people from flying in favor of burning through oil by artificially increasing its cost. Not to mention, like always, lining the pockets of the contractors in what is likely another no-bid scenario.

When 9/11 happened, public resources were poured into buying a bunch of nude body scanners that nobody wanted, were unvetted for long-term safety, and were literally useless for many types of weapons. But the measures were successful at making flying a nightmare.

Now the goal is to pour public resources into broadening the scope of no-fly list and implement a broken computer vision system to figure out who to ground? And for what? Has there been an upswing in terrorists hijacking planes domestically lately that we're responding to?

To my knowledge there have been 0 incidents of air travel terrorism in the US since 9/11.

It seems like the Republicans just like to make air travel as miserable as possible to convince the average American to choose to road trip in the face of cheap and quick air travel to justify their oil interests.

And with people as irresponsible as the ones who put in the Rapiscan machines in charge of evaluating threat levels it seem like a recipe for disaster (unless you are a private prison owner).

Not to mention that with 2012's National Defense Authorization act, America was qualified as a war zone to justify its indefinite detention clause. I don't think anyone what's to live in an America where groups of politically active people could be hauled off as terrorist threats because they didn't want an oil pipeline polluting the waterways of the natives.

Go to the airport for vacation and end up indefinitely detained as a terrorist? That would frighten many people out of flying I'd imagine.

DHS is a bad joke that needs to go away.

Unless companies like Tesla stop worrying about being the next "Great American Industry" and start focusing on real world problems and their solutions.

If Tesla could develop a network of self driving buses, that would have far greater reach and impact than trying to solve how to make a private network for charging and all case-considered self-driving system for asshole-mobiles. Not that Tesla cars aren't amazing, but they seem like a giant waste of resources for self-centered people. Not to mention in situations like self-driving, buses have completely predictable paths and because of that, it's much easier to optimize for corner cases to work toward a general solution.

With the exception of the handicapped, people don't really need cars. Bikes/e-bikes work great for any type of commute <30 miles and hauling cargo <100 lbs with a trailer. Electric skateboards are also great if you have little to carry and <12 miles to go. Beyond that, self-driving delivery fleets in the vain of UPS and buses make sense. There's really no valid reason to use a car unless you're an invalid.

But guys like Elon Musk are happy to burn the earth to the ground to terraform Mars instead of working on how to terraform places like Arizona or Pakistan because it looks better to them on paper. Or so it would seem.

Spoken like someone who's never experienced the inanity of the US's criminal justice system.

Many of the laws on the books are there due to lobbying, not logic, reason or need. Some are based on moral outrage to propaganda, some are due to businesses wanting greater leverage of their market and greater control over the entry-barrier. Many laws are totally unconstitutional but remain because someone must be successfully challenged which is hard when the law is meant to target the homeless guy you just don't like sitting on your corner who wouldn't have the means to hire a proper attorney.

I think what the original poster was getting at is that AI enforcement, with a broken legal system is a recipe for abuse and injustice.

The entire idea of selective enforceability is an affront to the concept of justice.

I've had my car searched for drugs by police in Arizona without cause other than they thought I "appeared to be on drugs" due to the fact they made me stand outside in the snow for 10 minutes while questioning me during a bogus traffic stop and I eventually started to shiver. I was driving through AZ on my way from Colorado to California... two places recreational marijuana are perfectly legal (by state standards) yet if they would have found even the smallest amount of weed in my car even if someone else had just dropped it somewhere (they check literally everywhere -- including rifling through my tea bags with their dirty paws), I would have been in jail on felony charges.

Granted I made sure my car was immaculate because I know how insane the people of AZ are when it comes to "criminal justice" and all it cost me was an hour of travel time. But the fact remains that there is no presumed consistency in law and felonies are a big deal and have consequences that reach far beyond some localized legal affair.

I have known people who have picked up felonies because they were doing something innocuous beside being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And when we start talking about AI enforcement, it's a scary concept because a felony means that for instance you could be picked up on federal firearm charges because some program found a slingshot in a picture of your bedroom on Facebook which gave them cause to issue a warrant to raid your house. And then you aren't able to flee the country because you can't just walk down to Mexico like you used to be able to because of the AI surveillance.

Taking the high-horse and saying people should trust in the system and just do their duty as citizens is great and all, but that type of ignorance is also why we have the highest prison population in the world. People who could be benefiting society even if only marginally, who are forced to be strictly welfare cases.

Not to mention, this isn't solving any problem - just opening the door to a bunch of new potential problems, so what's the point, other than lining the pocket of some random government contractor who probably lobbied for the tech in the first place? This is inane.

I think a lot of this comes from the general movement of America towards a police state. I have heard several stories of people having the cops called on them for allowing their children to play unsupervised. Some places consider it neglect to do so.

Pair that with the fact that we're giving kids hyper-addictive computer terminals with access to games and the internet and an endless landscape of different things to explore with an understanding of anonymity/privacy that they can't get anywhere else and no judgement because all the other kids are doing the same thing and you've created an environment where parents are more likely to try to keep their kids inside, and the kids distracted enough to accept their imprisonment.

I would say that there's no benefit to disclosing it to your employer based on your explanation. Patents are for protecting the inventor while time and money is invested in seeing an invention through to market. If your employer is the ideal producer for your concept and you want to limit their competition, then I suppose you could. But if you wanted to change jobs or were laid off, etc you would theoretically lose a bargaining chip and would have made any potential employer worse off by limiting their ability to also implement your idea.

If it's something that you want to protect for your own use, you could put basic substance of the patent application in a YouTube video or something and release it as public domain. (IANAL so YouTube may be ill-advised)

Also, life is unpredictable and you can sell/license a patented idea. Having more safety nets is better than less.

This person has obviously never ridden an e-bike. E-scooters are decidedly dorky. They can't corner well at high speeds. They carry almost no angular momentum to keep you moving forward. The only cool thing about a scooter is that you can easily hoist that 3 lb frame up and carry it with you without a second thought... add an 8 pound motor + battery to that and you've lost all your convenience when you have to climb several flights of stairs... An E-bike on the otherhand can benefit from its girth... it makes it harder to steal if you just add a cafe lock. That weight also makes it perfect for cruising. I can ride 10 miles on convoluted paths without touching my handlebars because of how predictable the ride is. I can ride up sharp grade hills at 20+ MPH without breaking a sweat in 90+ degree weather. And while I'm effortlessly cruising to my destination with minimal effort, I'M STILL PEDALING. It doesn't matter if I'm putting minimal effort in while I'm getting where I'm going, it's still exercise (not to mention way better from the perspective of arterial hardening from unnecessarily standing like a jack ass on a dork mobile). If you want to be totally lazy, get a Boosted board. If you want to revolutionize your shit, go to your local e-bike dealer and get them to hook you up with something actually meaningful.

Have you tried Zoho mail? It's not the same as rolling your own, but it's decentralized from Google's servers. Not just that but you can register domain specific addresses (like Google Apps) for free. It's my standard for new domains.

They can still collect all the info you provide them directly, but it's a bit different than cross-referencing your gmail account with your phone's location history and your google search history, paired with your Google calendar travel plans and emails about shopping list updates for your Amazon account.

Pretty sure the PR is a play to politicize his move and paint SV as a brick wall of intolerant liberalism and give the "conservatives" more fuel for their fire just like his speech at the RNC. Still have no idea why he's trying so hard to burn the community that generated his wealth though. Makes one wonder who he's really in bed with now.

Big rigs and repurposed cargo containers don't make sense as a comparison. All production costs of cargo containers are a sunk and they don't generate any waste on their own. Vehicles do. It's not just impractical - it's wasteful. Apples and oranges.

Electric cars are still massively wasteful. You could make ~250 e-bikes batteries with the same amount of lithium it takes to make one Tesla Model S battery. Then there's efficiency. In general - an e-bike goes around 100 miles per kWh where as a Tesla goes around 3-4 miles per kWh. So you're talking about massive waste in terms of material and energy efficiency. An electric bike is around 6300x more efficient than a Model S. Most of the time people are just using their big ass cars/trucks to haul their big asses - it's unnecessary. Telsa's powerwalls also use lithium. Cobalt supplies are heavily bottlenecked now and for the foreseeable future. Just because Musk wants to market his company as a solution to global warming doesn't make it at all true but I guess his advertising was effective on you.

You suggesting that somehow utilizing an entire electric big rig for yourself seems even more preposterous though. Tesla's electric big rig has a battery somewhere around 1200 kWh putting it at ~14 times more wasteful in terms of production resources than a Model S (assuming we're just talking about transporting <5 people). So you're essentially talking about offsetting 13 of your world saving cars or 3600 electric bikes worth of batteries just to haul yourself around at around 0.5 miles per kWh (putting your around 5-6 times less efficient than if you drove a Model X with a trailer).

To the belief in physics point - there is more to pollution than just the gasses created. There is also heat pollution. Most electricity in America still comes from coal. Even though you're not burning anything while you're running the vehicle doesn't mean the energy you're using isn't coming from something being burnt. While Tesla might also be working on stuff like Solar City - it doesn't change the fact that his solution is grid tied - meaning the infrastructure has to be built by existing power companies to deal with the load which they have no inherent incentive to do. Not to mention every ~21 hours or 1260 miles of driving you'd be using enough energy to power my 3 story house for a year.

Also - common sense check - what's the point of a road trip if you're going to try to be in the trailer the whole time? If you're going to skip all the scenery and stops anyway, you might as well fly. And have you tried doing a road trip in a big rig? They're not legal on a lot of roads and they're a major pain to find parking for unless you really enjoy camping at rest stops.

To your condescension - don't worry, I am, and have fun playing with your "Big Rig". You're probably right about electric cars magically fixing global warming. Enjoy your magic kingdom, pal.

That's a stretch.

I'm not sure if you mean in general or with regard to my original comment, but in general I think supporting a guy who personally claimed to have molested women and who was in the middle of several fraud lawsuits to run the country is absurd in my book. Maybe you have a different definition of absurdity. Trump was also making absurd comments about our 2 biggest trade allies Mexico and China saying that he was going to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it (aside from being an idiotic idea for a number of reasons - there was no way he was/is ever going to get Mexico to pay for the wall) and stating as a matter of fact that China was manipulating our currency and created the "hoax" of global warming. All absurd and senseless in my book.

Secondly for Thiel, there's the whole question of why on earth he would go on national TV to support Trump when he is completely outside the general demographic that Trump caters to. Trump's biggest supporters were some combination of baby-boomers (and to some extent their children), gun owners and Christians. Some of the ultra-rich may have been his biggest financial supporters and the ones that stand to gain the most from his presidency - but they are only a sliver of his actual voter base and an even smaller percentage of the American populous. By speaking out the way he did - he essentially put a spotlight on himself as someone willing to sacrifice the welfare of the people if it helps his own bottom line. He could have supported Trump indirectly and it wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election. I would say the way Thiel supported Trump was especially absurd.

Sure it is in the way Thiel did it. It was absurd for him to go on national television to make statements with 0 impact. Trump didn't win most places in the country Thiel might want to live. Trump lost on the entire west coast, Colorado and NY. He alienated himself and for what? He couldn't even help Trump win CA.

No. Trump is creating and repeating his own rhetoric. The mass media corporations aren't making him tweet constantly about the "Dems". Your statements about the media aren't wrong but that doesn't mean that Trump isn't also to blame. He's literally picking fights at every opportunity he gets.

Likening people to Thiel is ridiculous. He is personally facing the backlash from openly supporting Trump and being a speaker at his rallies. Nobody else in the valley did anything as absurd or unnecessary. And if he thinks he'll fair better in LA, I think he's sorely mistaken once people start recognizing him en masse. But to my point, this article seems to be generalizing an outlier to make its point. Everyone is being alienated everywhere because the country has a leader who is actively polarizing the populous by demonizing every side that he's not on as an enemy to his agenda, even going so far now as to suggest people who disagree should be labeled as traitors - which coming from the President, is technically a death threat as that is the punishment for treason. Peter Thiel seems to be actively trying to paint a more dystopian portrait of the situation to make himself out to be a victim when in reality people on both sides have been alienated by the dissolution of the "moderate" common ground where we all worked together in favor of a Monday Night Football-esque team based society (or crime drama - good v. bad). More generalizations like this that skew reality aren't going to help anything.

Why use a big rig? Why not an RV? Or a van conversion on something like a Sprinter? The entire premise you're proposing seems very wasteful and morally irresponsible if you care about stuff like global warming and believe in physics, but why try to optimize waste? Seems shortsighted.

So I'm late to the party but I'd say this doesn't really apply to this or similar controversial situations that CM30 solution aims to fix.

On budgetary matters, sure. You want to combine efforts to get legislation through that benefits your constituency even if it's a lot more costly than it would be if you could get your measure approved by itself. An example would be Congressman A has a bunch of people complaining about the all the dangerous intersections in their state, Congressman B has a bunch of bridges that are falling apart, so the two get together and create a Federal Road Improvements Act or whatever to appropriate budget for what is now being considered a nation concern. This is a logical place for riders as it allows federal budgeting to have the greatest reach it can for helping the states.

There is substantially less logical argument when the riders concern law. From your example, if a law ever put a congressman's constituency worse off than they were before, there is no time when that representative should support it. Creating an environment of sweeping bad law into bills set to pass is inherently dangerous because once in place, laws are considered correct until properly invalidated.

But the nature of these riders is different still. This is law being thrown into budget. Just like the super controversial sections in the 2012 NDAA, these are mixing two very different types of bills. Having law riders is dangerous enough as it is, but allowing them to be thrown into budgetary bills that must pass is just insane.

The problem is there is currently no delineation in congress between the two types of bills. Everything they do whether budgetary or policy based is law and is generally "over the head of us simple minded folk" so they have leveraged a tremendous amount of freedom in the way that they can push things through regardless of how much sense anything they do ultimately makes.

I think the first-step solution would be to separate bill types and only allow appropriation riders on budgetary matters and no riders when it comes to new law/policy. If that is too complicated for them, they shouldn't be law makers.

>> Does the javascript decoder download the images, or does the browser do that, then the javascript simply decode it?

Right now, it would appear that the with a hard reload of the demo: http://bellard.org/bpg/lena.html on chromium, the BPG images are initially loaded with the page, then the posts.js file scans through the page's images to find the ones who's src ends in '.bpg', then posts.js re-downloads the same files with ajax, which are then decoded to PNG files rendered in canvas tags with no identifying information.

The extra request to re-download images is unnecessary but easily removed to just process the data loaded with the initial page load.

>> Can CSS reference them without javascript changing the styles?

Not from what I can see. The images are being rendered to canvas elements without any identifying information. The decoder will need to be modified to add identifying id's or classes. This again is an easy fix.

>> Can they be cached locally if downloaded directly?

This is what I perceive to be an issue. Try downloading the image rendered to the 5kb bpg example... The image that is being rendered is a 427.5kb PNG and that's for a 512x512 image size.

PNGs aren't lossy... so any difference in file size is going to be the product of rendering size or how much the bpg compression has simplified the source image. ( I'm guessing the file size follows something like a logarithmic curve where it jumps initially based on rendered image dimensions and then approaches a limit as the compression approaches lossless. )

Because of the rendered out PNGs' large file size, I would expect that if you are rendering out large images or a lot of images, you would definitely use more resources than with comparable quality JPGs regardless of whether you cache the BPGs for rendering and you would indeed experience the drawbacks you mentioned in both memory and page-load time.

That being said, this is a cool idea, an incredible proof of concept and I'm very thankful to Fabrice for putting it out there.

I don't blame the people of the town for being upset; "Whatever, USA" is a pretty offensive name as it completely negates the people, the culture and the history of the town.

For instance, if someone called NYC "Whatever, USA": you would probably think them ignorant as even if you've never been to the city, you likely know at least some of the things that give the city its unique identity.

For the people who know and love their precious hometown, to sit by and watch while it is stripped of its identity and rebranded as "Whatever" must be a tough pill to swallow even if it is only temporary and brings in revenue.

The other obvious issue is that the contract was undertaken unilaterally by the town government in secret. For the mayor to take on a contract that affects all residents in such a major way as road closures for street painting, and shutting down the town for a multi-day rager without consulting the people seems incredibly careless, especially considering that there's no real way to hide such an event.

Projects like this can at least be introduced to the community in the town hall for discussion before obligating the town to a contract to avoid secrecy as generally (at least in terms of governmental operations): if you have to hide what you're doing, it's likely something you shouldn't be doing.

For now, many of the people of the town have to deal with an event they didn't want for money that will be spent on a "yet-to-be-determined capital project" that will likely be decided on in the same unilateral fashion as the town was decided to be prostituted for a party by someone who was okay with labeling the town "Whatever" in secret.

From my understanding, people generally elect officials to represent and hold true to the town's identity and increase the welfare of the people of the community, not rebrand it as "Whatever, USA" and annoy the people of the town because it makes some money for a potential future project.

With the actions of the town officials, I would say the residents are rightly pissed. Money is not the only measure of utility.