theluketaylor

It was fought tooth and nail by Moroun every step of the way, which is one of the reasons the Canadian federal government is paying for the whole bridge including the changes to I-75. Moroun got several US funding bills killed and nearly succeeded in preventing the Canadian government from picking up the tab.

I've never seen a stronger case for ensuring public ownership of key infrastructure in all cases, otherwise you can end up in a situation where two giant economies are held hostage by one person. It's also a cautionary tale on the dangers of special interests and lobbying being able to stifle action so clearly in the public interest.

More for pleasure craft than commercial shipping, but I have taken a boat through the big chute marine railway in Ontario. Very cool experience.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Chute_Marine_Railway

Rolex mostly makes good typeface decisions (largely sticking with what has worked for decades), but modern Explorer numeral indices are awful. Explorer ref 1016 from the 60s is a design icon and nearly perfect, which just makes the current poor choices stand out all the more.

Rolex has also made the fonts a little too large and prominent on the modern watches.

Outdoor units are pretty flexible in the sorts of places they can be mounted and the insulated refrigerant lines can be run to the interior of buildings fairly easily. Don't just assume a solution can't work until an expert says no.

And even if you can't hook into your existing radiators wall mounted mini splits don't require extensive interior changes to function (plus you get cooling as well)

It's insane that buildings on the historic register are not permitted to install modern, efficient windows as mentioned in the article. Replicating the look 90%+ should be pretty easy, so why on earth would owners be banned from improving the efficiency of their home in a nearly transparent way.

Insulation and air sealing should be heavily subsidized. Regardless of the energy source, using less energy in the first place has a compounding carbon benefit for the lifespan of the building (which is almost certainly multiples of the lifespan of the current heat source).

Drilling down is best for retrofitting existing structures and built environments, but for new neighbourhood development trenching is super cheap since you have to disturb all that dirt anyway. Prep for roads and all the underground services means you have the ground open anyway, might as well run some coolant lines while you're down there.

District heating loops can be done almost for free with greenfield development and it should be highly incentivized to slash the energy required to heat and cool the new structures.

You're massively underestimating just how much wiring is in a modern car. The car industry has been trying to move to 48V for decades to save money on wiring and Tesla just succeeded with Cybertruck. High consumption devices like electric power steering, electric A/C, and active anti-roll bars all require huge amperage to run at 12V and are only becoming more common on cars.

Car makers project big savings in moving to 48V and it's going to become a lot more common.

In BC and Ontario (and I believe other places too) the building code includes passive heat capture for drains for new builds. You can recover quite a bit of the heat for very little money.

Some building code elements are absolutely critical, like the burn time required for external walls and then increasing it for shared walls. That absolutely saves lives and should be sacrosanct. Plenty of other code requirements are overly bureaucratic and do nothing but add expense, like ever decreasing maximum distance between outlets.

Zoning is the same way. Some of the rules are critical, but most are existing residents enforcing their preferences via bylaw. Ensuring adequate buffers between truly industrial uses and residential is a great use of zoning. Not being able to open low impact business like a barber shop or cafe in a residential neighbourhood makes absolutely no sense. Lot coverage percentages, parking minimums, height restrictions that don't allow gentle density, and exclusive single family zoning all need to go.

More than a century of code and zoning restriction have piled on each other over and over (with zoning often deeply rooted in racist policies). It's long past time to identify the safety critical ones and eject all the rest. It's true of zoning moreso than building code, but both could use a serious refactor.

The E-GMP solution is also a clever one. I believe the inverter is limited to about 150 kW sustained (I think it can peak a little higher to the motors). 150 kW isn't bad but it's also a fair ways away from the 230 kW E-GMP will do on 800V.

Hellcats are built to go fast in a straight line with the limitations of a 20+ year old platform. Beating a vehicle Dodge spent about $20 developing in a shed with a giant pushrod engine and hand-me-down parts they got from 90s Mercedes Benz isn't that big an accomplishment.

Going fast in a straight line is easy for electric motors, so it's just not that impressive. It's like a native speaker enrolling in language 101. The A doesn't really mean anything. EVs have been up against the limits of tire adhesion for years now.

EVs with impressive sustained track times are far more interesting since that's actually hard to achieve. Batteries are heavy and that's killer for a real race car.

That 911 will pound hot lap after hot lap until the fuel tank is empty like it's nothing if the owner ticked the ceramic brake option. I suspect the Cybertruck will run out of cooling long before it drains the battery and I guarantee it will cook the brakes hauling itself down from 130 mph.

Edit: plus F-150 Raptor R does a 12.1 quarter mile. That's pretty close to running 11s.

I am curious what cybertruck will charge like at existing superchargers that max out at 400V.

GM's clever solution is to present the battery pack as 2 400V packs. It does pose some very tricky pack balancing requirements though.

Other 800V cars charge quite poorly on 400V stations, usually with a hard cap at much lower than the potential max charge due to inverter limits.

Interior of a F-150 Platinum is way nicer than anything Tesla has ever made and that's where nearly all the $20,000 goes to (along with Ford's nice margin for a luxury truck).

Trim-to-trim equivalency hard to get since Tesla interiors are so spartan and each company is putting their money in difference places, but it's probably Lariat. Lariat big battery comes to about 76K compared to the true purchase price of 100K for cyberbeast.

There is a reason reduce is the first R. Not consuming energy in the first place is less carbon emitted today and less generation capacity that needs to be transitioned. It really is an 'every little bit helps' situation. Dismissing solutions as too small ignores the fact we need hundreds of thousands of small solutions along with many, many big ones.

The tragedy of commons at work. Each individual iPhone is a very small consumer of energy, but Apple has 2 billion active devices in the wild. 10g x 2 billion devices is suddenly quite significant and worthwhile. It's an interesting win that probably didn't actually take that many resources to implement. It won't come close to solving climate change on its own, but it's certainly not doing any harm and I'd much rather Apple implement it rather than not bothering.

As the article points out, rural farms are ideal candidates for smaller wind turbines since they have tons of space and relatively high energy needs. Harry Metcalfe is a British farmer who has both solar and wind installed on his farm and regularly posts updates about his entire farming operations to youtube. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but I appreciate his perspective as someone actually drilling and harvesting crops.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI84cFcF5ew

Insulation resists heat transfer in both directions. Extremely well insulated and air sealed homes resist heating up just as much as they resist cooling off.

Windows are a bit special in that you can get solar gain through them, but modern windows can have coatings that filter UV and IR from entering a building.

People and electronics are heat sources inside a home, but pretty minimal ones. Any reasonably speced ventilation system a modern home needs to exchange outside air will easily handle keeping a modern house cool.

The bill of materials for 16GB of RAM isn’t remotely close to $200, it’s likely under $10. This is pure profit for Apple.

Chips get cheaper over time and there is a general expectation the base specs move forward without the price rising. The MacBook Pro has had 8 GB of RAM base since 2014, which is a century in chip time. 16 should have been the base several revisions ago and the long apple leaves it this way the worse it looks, since no one should be buying a “pro” device that needs upgrades to be competent.

Yeah, it can be nasty. Ammonia is a very common refrigerant for ice rinks here in Canada. Operators die every so often across the country due to undetected leaks.

Ammonia seems like a grid scale storage solution, not something we can distribute across people’s homes. Home storage we should start focused on thermal batteries since it’s highly proven technology that needs almost zero maintenance.

Frustratingly despite CDPQ doing a great job on REM (with several stages left to deliver) the next phase of the project has been taken away from them. REM East was going to repeat plan and success for the REM in the eastern end of the island (historically the poorer parts of the city). It would also provide a whole new line into downtown, providing relief for the overcrowded green line

Some groups (including envrionment groups bizarrely) objected to the elevated rails, even though these would not split neighbourhoods the way elevated highways did in the 60s throughout north america.

The project was taken away from CDPQ who proved they can deliver transit on time and on budget in both Montreal and Vancouver and given back to STM who have a history of cost overruns. STM immediately proposed running the entire network underground and not running it into downtown, requiring a 2 seat ride onto the green line which is already over-crowded. That explodes estimated costs to $36B CDN from CDPQ's $10B and delivers fewer km of track and less function. What a mess.

We should be pouring money into herbicide-free weed control, like laser equipped robots (which I swear is not a sci-fi fever dream)

https://carbonrobotics.com/

The turn signal stalk has a button on the end. Small press activates the wiper. Large press cleans the window with washer fluid. Either press brings up the wiper menu on the screen to adjust frequency.

I love my model 3 but the wipers are by far the worst feature. The auto sensing is awful in light mist, there are not enough different intermittent settings, and changing the speed is a nightmare.

> The government could forbid all private construction and take over home development itself, placing price caps as needed

Nothing approaching that radical an approach would be required. Just getting funded public housing agencies with a mandate to develop non-market multi-family housing using properties in the city's portfolio would be a massive victory for affordability.

Exactly. In the developed world the least free market is the real estate market. Free market extremists show up as NIMBYs at local council meetings. Progressives are no better, placing all sorts of rules on development in the name of fairness that only result in even higher prices and less development.

Zoning rules like height restrictions, floor area ratio, lot coverage, setbacks, parking minimums, square footage minimums, lot size minimums, and other zoning restrictions place extreme limits what can be built before we even mention exclusive single family zoning.

Not just the dominance, but the legal requirement for.

Height restrictions, floor area ratio, lot coverage, setbacks, parking minimums, square footage minimums, lot size minimums, and lots of other zone requirements all contribute to a floor on the price of housing.

There are plenty of really good requirements like firebreaks and egress points, but not everything should to be enforced by zoning. Many of these things should be allowed to be controlled by the market. If people truly want 2 car garages and 1/2 acre lots they can pay for it. Making it the legal minimum to construct massively distorts the market.

Zoning massively benefits the existing occupants of a location and when there is a housing crisis just makes matters so much worse.

Public housing doesn't fundamentally require income restrictions. Most locations place limits on eligibility for public housing, but that's simply because there isn't that much public housing so it's prioritized for those most in need.

Part of Vienna's success is building so much public housing there is plenty to go around, so all sorts of people live in public housing. There isn't a stigma associated with public housing since using it doesn't imply any specific trait.

I'm a big fan of building all sorts of non-market housing all over cities to avoid the slum problem. Charge means-tested rent, so someone will low income pays very little rent. Someone with a good job pays closer to market rent (and that extra revenue helps pay for the overall housing program).

One of the huge successes of Vienna's public housing model is mixing people of different socioeconomic backgrounds. People connect with people with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences resulting in much strong social cohesion.

> People really, really do not understand what living rural is like.

The same criticism applies equally well to rural dwellers about urban life which is why someone rural could be shocked by the idea someone might actively choose to to travel by high quality public transportation.

I have lived both rural and urban and actively choose urban. Rural is a fine choice too, but rural dwellers shouldn't expect their energy intensive and economically expensive lifestyle to be subsidized by urban dwellers forever. Maintaining a huge road network with relatively low utilization is massively expensive and western rural life is currently among the most carbon intensive lifestyles.

Which is fine, but I'm sick of those same people consistently voting against high quality public transport inside cities while insisting on urban highways and tons of parking for when they come to the city. Untold billions have been spent creating a road network to support their rural lifestyle and then they object to any money being spent on transportation modes other than driving.

Farmers get a pass since they are producing things on the land. Everyone else who chooses to live rural or exurban doesn't get to object to urban dwellers wanting quality transit or to reduce the prominence of cars in urban spaces.

And public roads are free? The streets inside a city and highways connecting them are massively expensive and no one bats an eye. Even toll highways often don't really pay for themselves.

Transportation infrastructure of any mode is massively expensive and is undertaken to facilitate all sorts of economic activity. Public transportation being held to a standard of direct profit is something no other public infrastructure is expected to achieve.

A single subway line in Toronto is 38 km / 24 miles long. A single regional rail line passing through downtown is 114 km / 71 miles long. A 15 mile commute is perfectly achievable on public transit when the facilities exist.