smachiz

Relocation assistance != disaster assistance

Stop paying for them to keep rebuilding the house, give them the money to move.

>I know of no place on earth that is without some susceptibility to natural disaster. So where do we draw the line?

OP proposed twice, you objected. I think twice with no time horizon isn't useful. Twice in 50 years seems reasonable for someone who lives in a 100 year flood plain.

But these flood plains are growing with climate change. Storms are getting worse and more frequent. Just continuing to pay to rebuild is not the answer.

FEMA doesn't decide where you live, but they do provide federally subsidized flood insurance. He's suggesting that we should stop doing that for two total loss events on the same property.

Folks have had their houses rebuilt with other people's money really often - and build it in the exact same spot, because the feds will come build it again. Even though it's going to get destroyed, again.

I think you're misunderstanding what they're saying. They're saying that federal funds should not be used to repair/replace infrastructure in places that are highly prone to natural disasters. If you have two total-loss natural disasters in less than 50 years either the infrastructure is unsuitable to the risks, or there is no infrastructure suitable for the risks.

Are you saying that unmitigated flood prone areas _should_ be habitable? And the cost of that underwritten with public funds?

There are people who have their house rebuilt every ~15 years from hurricanes with public funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...

>The NFIP is managed and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) through the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration (FIMA).[1] The program is designed to provide an insurance alternative to disaster assistance to meet the escalating costs of repairing damage to buildings and their contents caused by floods.[2] As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[3][4] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[3][5] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.[6]

I think being that you're so ruggedly individualistic, maybe pull yourself up by your bootstraps and pay for your own repairs?

If you're footing the bill for fair market insurance, those places quickly get returned to the environment because it makes no economic sense to build there. Or it does, and the federal government still doesn't have to pay for it.

i think they grew too quickly and just hired some people that were "content" makers not real reviewers, who weren't spending the time required to actually understand, nor actually have any scientific method.

I wouldn't be surprised if some of their reviewers were getting paid on the side for their recommendations (it seemed like it might've been freelanced out reading some of the reviews).

I've seen some signs that they might be getting better... let's hope.

But Consumer Reports has always been great for me.

I pay for Consumer Reports. I used to love wirecutter - and then bought some of their recommendations that were garbage.

Consumer Reports sometimes overindexes to things I don't care about ("complicated technology"), but they usually put in the work and break it down well.

Are project proposals not sales pitches? Isn't this what everyone in academia complains about? Having to "sexy" up science so they can sell it to people (get other people to pay for it)?

Check your local library. Mine has a surprisingly robust eBook collection via Libby that's easy - and integrated with Amazon for delivery to my Kindle.

My library also has a fairly robust eBook collection via Libby.

Lift to drag is interesting - but without dividing by seats or tons is incomplete. You’re not really measuring work being done (actually transporting goods or people).

These problems are hard.

Lift induced drag goes down as velocity decreases, parasitic drag goes up as velocity increases. There’s there’s wave drag to contend with. Yes there’s weird places where going faster is helpful, but I doubt we’re going to see real net efficiency gains going faster than Mach .8-9 anytime soon.

> In cruise mode Concorde was as efficient as a Boeing 747.

Yes - a plane that carries 550 passengers vs a plane carrying 100.

Also, the game has changed a fair bit - no one is building 4 engined planes anymore - because while it was about as efficient as a 747, it’s going to be less than half as efficient as a 777. That carries 400 passengers.

it also solves the 4th, since you typically are going to land your private jet at Teterboro instead of JFK or LGA (i.e. small fields without a lot of taxiing, or more importantly in NY, queuing for a runway (I've heard that we're 23rd in line for takeoff more times than I can count)).

The taxiing was bad, but that wasn't the worst of it. To go from subsonic to mach 1.7 the Concorde used reheat ("afterburner") that just dumps fuel into the already hot exhaust. This is not particularly efficient. Then from 1.7 to mach 2 it didn't need reheat, and at mach 2 it was quite efficient of an engine design.

A 747 carries 500 passengers, Concorde carried 100. Your costs per seat mile are going to be at least 5x higher.

The Concorde engine was efficient at cruise - and pretty awful everywhere else. At cruise it was about 10% more efficient than a GE90. But the Concorde had 4 of them, and a 777 has 2 GE90s.

This is also why you don't see 4 engined planes anymore, except for the A380 and most people were hell bent on retiring during the pandemic until they couldn't get more 787s/A350s and the 777X is delayed.

LAX-SIN is still more than 2x the best projected range of this plane.... Flying supersonic really guzzles gas, you're carrying gas to carry gas. Maybe if Boom added mid air refueling... but they'd have to slow down for an hour to do it.

DXB-JFK is over land almost 50% of the route, it will never make sense for Boom or anyone - you can fly subsonic to London and transfer to supersonic to shave a few hours off though - though shave off 45-60 minutes for transit buffer.

If they actually can get 4,250nm of usable range, you might be able to do something in Japan to SEA or maybe SFO, and that routing would make more sense probably.

But this is really really unlikely to ever fly - the physics and economics are so stacked against this until something really tectonic happens with how we store and use energy... but like not fossil fuels. It would need to be something that borders on "free", like if fusion existed, and was safe, easy and light.

A military engine is unlikely to be the answer for Boom. They just won't be cost effective.

The math for efficiency and maintenance is just different for sovereign governments, maybe a derivative could be made more efficient with less maintenance required.

Fighter jets require like 6 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight - sure, it's not just the engines, but it's a big part of it.

The real problem boom has is the number of viable flights is _very_ low - really just the ones Concorde flew (NY-LON, NY-PAR), and Concorde never made money.

A couple comments up someone claimed DXB-NYC being a route - more than half of the great circle route is over land, and it's more than 50% longer than the rosy projections Boom put out. Realistically, they'll be lucky if they're within 10% of their stated range. But of course, not without an engine.

This is what 4,250nm would get you from JFK: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?R=4250nm%40JFK

We also didn't care about being green back during the Concorde - but Supersonic flights will likely be 5x-10x worse on a per passenger seat mile basis for emissions. Really hard to get around wind resistance being a square of velocity.

How many is it usually cancelled in? Is that a lot? How many does it appear in? Is it still funny?

I love eating alone - it's a rare treat for me. My suggestion is to always sit at the bar if you can. I feel like many of the social norms at a table don't apply at the bar - I don't feel bad reading my kindle, drinking a glass of wine and enjoying my meal in solitude.

The bartenders don't care at all, and will happily leave you alone - and I don't feel guilty about occupying a table.

I don't think you're right about Klarna. I mean sure, it enables people to spend outside their means, but it hardly seems predatory.

If I'm reading this right, the late payment fee is maximum of $7 for their 4 payment thing?

https://cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/legal/terms/0/en_u...

If you bounce a check or an ACH the fee seems to be $27 (but not more than you owe) for their 30 day plan: https://cdn.klarna.com/1.0/shared/content/legal/terms/0/en_u...

Their pay over time thing seems to be 0-29.99% which seems in line with credit cards?

I mean, sure, I guess making it easy for people who make bad financial choices isn't great... but it's also easy for people who are making good financial choices.

They could absolutely destroy them fast enough. The also only need to destroy them fast enough that SpaceX finds it economically infeasible to continue launching them or blocking them themselves.

I also think that both countries could launch geosync satellites or using existing geosync satellites to just generate a shitton of noise on whatever spectrum Starlink would use.

Starlink of course won't get a license for spectrum in either country.

>Going 2x faster is obviously a good thing, everything else being equal. Costs can potentially go down as you can run 2x the flights per day. People enjoy flights more.

Unfortunately due to where you can fly supersonic, you're pretty much limited to over water routes. NYC-LON is probably the most financially viable route - but a 3.5-4hr flying time, you can't actually really fly a decent red eye. Ask anyone who has done DEN-NYC. It's a pretty brutal experience.

You leave NYC at midnight, get in at 8:30AM local with a 5 hour time change. You might have gotten an hour of sleep. Sure, some people might pay it, but most would happily leave at 8:30PM and hopefully get 4 hours of sleep.

This was the same problem with Concorde - how do you justify 3-5x the ticket price to arrive less well rested? Who's 4 hours are worth that? It's a pretty small club.

There's a limited amount of daytime flights you can run, but you're going to wind up either running aircraft turns unprofitably to position the plane for your profitable times or having more aircraft than you want sitting on the ground.

Ultimately, it just doesn't really make economic sense. Yes, people value frequency, but they also value money. On NY-LON there's probably 15+ flights a day anyway.

>The difference between a 2.5 hour and 5 hours flight is a lot. A 6 hour and 12 hour flight, a lot.

Unfortunately there's a devil in these details - the plane can't fly a 6 hour supersonic flight. Their rosiest projections are 4,250nm - that puts FCO (Rome) out of reach). That flight is blocked at 8h20m. Of that, especially in NY, 1.5 hours is probably taxiing/climb out/descent. Boom can't do anything about that (except flying out of undesirable airports...)

On shorter flights, that becomes a large percentage of the flying time. I.e. NY-MIA that you could conceivably detour over the water to fly supersonic on, and maybe trim 30 minutes off the total flying time.

Ultimately, the airports where you can fly supersonic to for the majority of the flight are very limited even if you solved the economic challenges.

I still remember hearing the sonic booms from Concorde out on long island - no way frequent supersonic flights get tolerated when they're not well overwater.

Wishful thinking, delusion or scam.

There are so many foundational issues with low supersonic flight from a usability perspective as well (time zones are not your friend for some of it), that lots of routes can only command a premium in one direction.

You have to make so many rosy assumptions to even believe this makes sense if someone was willing to pour billions into engine tech - and still maybe have no options that are commercially viable. It’s also a nightmare from an environmental perspective.

There is no engine that will make economic sense for either the engine manufacturer or the airline operator based on the technology we have.

This was always a fools errand.

Maybe? But you can also point a camera at your screen and record the whole thing...or do it in software with screen/audio capture.

The point is the app isn't recording without telling people just to do captioning.

No app prevents bad actors from recording.

In Teams at least, it's called transcription, but really it's captioning. It's not recorded unless you also turn on recording.

TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) is the largest contract manufacturer of complex CPUs there is.

They're building a massive fab in Phoenix.

The number of people using Matrix/Element is so small and relatively sophisticated that it probably has a super low expected value for spammers.

Not true for iMessage at all...

Because the overlap between spammers and unscrupulous people with credit card numbers is 0?

They're just going to use prepaid cards they scammed from people to buy iMessage and absolutely spam the crap out of that.

Not really true - depending on volume.

In almost all certainty they have volume commitments out months - and have for at least two years.

JIT stopped being a reality a while ago.

If you know you're sitting on 2 months of inventory, and you're getting shipments that are equal to 1 month of capacity every month, and it takes 3-5 weeks by sea, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do still.

Also, depending on their contracts, they may not pay the vendor until they receive the goods at their location, so the sea freight shipment doesn't have a cost for time value of money.

If you're sitting on a buffer, time value of money doesn't matter - and only gets worse by spending more money to get it sooner if you can only produce say 5k cars/week - doesn't matter if you get parts sooner you can't use.

This is what bag holders say.