1,540 karma · joined June 29, 2017
A stock '66 Mustang hardtop had a curb weight below 3000lb, in the lightest configuration close to 2500lb.
Less mass to move will do a lot for efficiency just like aerodynamics will.
Of course, you will also die or be horrifically maimed in an accident in a 1966 Mustang that you might walk away without any serious injuries from in a modern vehicle.
The balcony appears to have full coverage on the railing - there isn't a gap at the bottom for anything to fall out through. The metal frame makes it looks like there is at first glance, but look at the seam on the glass - it continues further down than that bottom crossbar.
This might fall over into the balcony some day and break but it shouldn't really be a hazard to anyone else.
Beyond this, the reality is that plenty of the other balconies likely have string lights or other electronic items plugged in 24/7 and with their connectors sitting on the ground on the balcony. Same with having a bunch of unsecured/poorly items that could theoretically get tossed off it by an extreme storm. Not ideal, but I don't see why we should be acting like this is much different from everything else in that sense.
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Now speaking more generally:
- Cities should have reasonable regulations (and likely, already do) about securing anything being positioned where it could fall off and hit someone, particularly over a sidewalk or public space. (As mentioned, I don't think this one is a major hazard upon taking a second glance).
- Balcony solar kits should probably at least ship with some safety cabling and have integrated mount points for those cables that are sturdy enough to withstand wind + drop shocks.
- My concerns in the US/North America are more around how we handle the much lower ratings of our typical residential circuits, it's easier for a consumer to overload a circuit here with something like this than in Europe.
- If we're not requiring a dedicated circuit/single-outlet circuit for it seems difficult to maintain safety unless we're capping the maximum power per system quite low. And if we are requiring a dedicated circuit for it/an electrician to approve it we're greatly limiting who will ever be able to install these.
Overall though, I'm still positive on the concept and don't want to see it buried in regulatory hell, especially with how well adoption has apparently gone elsewhere.
In 2006 there was a message posted by him in the forums that was: "This one is a guilt-free download. (shhhh - I didn’t say that out loud). If you know what I’m talking about, cool."
At the same time a user on TPB named "seed0" uploaded:
- A previously unreleased, professionally produced, expanded DVD version of Closure
- The full Broken movie in DVD quality (which had never leaked - the low-quality leaked versions that had circulated for yeas were missing part of it)
- 3 "The Definitive NIN" collections - which included some things that were difficult to find otherwise. (And today there are official playlists/collections by the same "Definitive NIN" name on the streaming platforms).
Maybe more but those are the most notable things I recall until all the pro-shot concert footage from the Lights in the Sky Tour got released to the fans to play with a few years later - most prominently turned into the "Another Version of the Truth - The Gift".
Not that there was any doubt, and while I don't feel like digging through all the interviews/AMAs I am almost certain that Rob Sheridan (creative director at the time) confirmed years later that the "leaks" were directly from the NIN camp.
I actually hadn't realized until I went looking that the "standard drink" isn't much of an international standard unit at all. Will have to keep that in mind when reading papers/recommendations from different health authorities in the future.
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Anyway, it's pretty interesting. I'm not sure I'm going to believe the effect just on one noisy study, but even if the reality is something lesser - like it just not harming memory formation of things you'd learned earlier in the day, the implications are still a bit interesting.
It certainly adds a bit to some of the historical social biases against "day drinking", and also does a bit to explain how plenty of high-performing young people seem to use alcohol pretty heavily after they're done learning (college students partying, etc) with limited direct impacts on their educational performance.
And you're not going to plug yourself I certainly will: Appreciate your work on the NIN Hotline all these years and everything else you've done/added to the community.
> Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay,
You'd certainly know better than I would but I feel like I recall Rob Sheridan confirming that in one of his interviews years later (not that there was really any doubt).
Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).
NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.
NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).
However, arrivals stay pretty heavy right up until 23:59 even on schedule and if you've got a lot of delayed flights (not exactly uncommon at LGA) - you may still have a lot of departures going out in the 23:00 hour.
I would not be surprised to learn that they're staffed to an appropriate level for what the schedule says is supposed to be operating at that time, but a very inadequate level for what actually winds up operating at that time on many days.
Initial analysis suggests they were running about 75% of full capacity in flight ops in the 15min prior to the accident. I doubt they were staffed to 75% of the daytime peak.
Looking at the normal schedules - if all is on schedule there'd be no departures in the 23:00 hour but you'd still have the arrivals side running pretty heavily. However, once you factor in things not being on schedule, as they evidently were not on that night, you get:
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The 15min before the accident had 14 flight operations (per Juan Browne/blancolirio going through the ADSB playback). And that's in marginal weather and at night, which makes things more complicated.
That is 75% of the official maximum capacity of the airport - during the main part of the day where there's government-imposed caps on flights, it's capped at 74 operations per hour or about 18.5 per 15min.
As such, it seems apparent that you would need just as much staffing (or at least 75% as much) at that time to safely handle the traffic volume that was occurring that night as you did in the main part of the day.
Unless the normal staffing here was just 2 people, it seems clear that 1 is inadequate.
And it's also well-documented that the average Western diet is highly deficient in fiber and that this is a thing which has gotten much worse in the last 75 years.
There also seems to be at least some light evidence that there may be generational effects - that the starting point of your gut is already bad if your mother's was.
Anyway your actual problem are data center buildouts that are causing demand to skyrocket. They've gone from 5% of your electrical demand to >20% in less than a decade, and are the primary cause of your electricity crunch.
If your hiring model is hiring multiple people through one posting, then you will probably get a lot fewer angry ex-candidates being weird (because they think you've lied to them since the posting is still up) by just sending out rejections that don't say that and just get the "we're no longer interested in you for this role" message across.
Nicer/more corporate language for both, of course.
Why are you using a tone that implies that's not the case?
Even more surprisingly to me - a pretty decent chunk of businesses even would accept AmEx. By no means all, but I recall it being basically nonexistent not that long ago.
And to be clear - much of my time was not in areas that get a ton of foreign tourist visitors.
Not saying your experience didn't happen, but given our very different experiences it might be something with your particular bank/issuer/card?
That said I can confirm that a few years back a friend who had previously used/experimented with a wide variety of substances (EDM scene, psychs), had no trouble getting a clearance.
They disclosed all of it, said they weren't currently using it and wouldn't for as long as they were in the job role, passed the drug test, and that was fine.
That said, to add to the "lying is a bad idea" point: I believe some of their references were asked about if they'd ever known that friend to have a dependency + if they were aware of any current/very recent use.
The color scales aren't equivalent here but you can see the difference:
Europe - pretty much only unpopulated northern Scandinavia + up in the Alps/Pyrenees getting over 64 days, most of the most densely populated areas with lots of infrastructure below 32 days: https://www.atlas.impact2c.eu/en/climate/freeze-thaw-days/?p...
US - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Climatology-of-Freeze-... (Fig 4.2) - Probably more than 50% is over 75 cycles, and large chunks breaking 100 cycles a year (almost all of New England and some other scattered patches, the Rockies/interior West/Western Plains).
As an example:
I live in New England. We do not have enough natural gas pipeline capacity to meet demand in long periods of very cold weather, and have very limited natural gas storage that can't buffer that for as long as a cold spell can last.
In these periods of time the grid traditionally keeps the lights on by switching over a significant portion of the grid to burning oil for power, and/or with the occasional LNG tanker load into Everett MA. These are both....pretty terrible and expensive solutions.
Burning less natural gas during the day still helps at night/at peak, because it means there's been less draw-down of our limited storage/more refill of it during the day, so we don't have to turn to worse options as heavily at night.
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Distilling what I remember about an entire book I read a couple years ago into a HN comment is difficult, but one of the more salient notes from it is this: Adult humans are naturally suspicious of others and slow to trust, particularly those they have no existing points of connection to. In contrast - children have much lower inhibitions in this sense and are much better at this.
Alcohol, in moderation, is one of the most effective tools in humanity's arsenal to more easily socialize with and create trust with total strangers.
The "reduction of inhibitions" we are all aware of in terms of being a risk of making negative choices, also serves to greatly reduce inhibition of the average adult to new interactions and experiences.
It is difficult to achieve this result in adults otherwise, especially in terms of a single activity with low investment required in time, money, facilities, and commitment.
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It is likely that as we transitioned from a society where adult encounters with total strangers were rare (tribal/village) to common (urban) that alcohol played a pretty significant role in creating the social cohesion for it.
It is not at all clear that we have found some successful alternative to this, and we may well find that even with all the documented downsides of it, we're worse off as a society for moving away from it.
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Again, this is my recollection of a book I read a couple years back - don't take this word for word. I will also note that it's not all rosy and has some thoughts on the types of consumption we should probably discourage as well and the general risk/reward of alcohol in society.
Or that create significant concern that they're unwilling to do their job responsibilities if it means working with/interacting with people who don't share their political views. More than a few people openly state things like that online as well.
Many people had that sort of experience in say....the 1950-2000. You had a lot of smaller new developments bulldozed into new areas, and for the first 20 years especially - almost everyone who moved in to those new homes, moved in at a similar time and with young children of a similar age.
In this way, those pockets of suburbia had a bunch of temporary features. You had a much higher quantity of local children within walking distance than would naturally be the case in the long-term for that number of mid-sized SFH homes, and you had a highly developed area with a highly undeveloped area nearby. (land not yet turned into subdivisions like your own).
But a few decades down the line, even without the large behavioral shifts in society - now you've got an endless sea of divided-up suburbia with no nearby wilderness accessible by children on foot/bike, and there's only 2 nearby kids of the same age range rather than 20.
Which is to say - I think it's very difficult to achieve that as as a stable long-term environment, at least with the typical US SFH subdivision density.
And once you get out to rural you run into the problem of the kids not being able to see each other without parental involvement.
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Anyway, I did grow up in a "goldlocks zone" environment like you describe. It was very nice, and I was particularly adventurous + had more relaxed than average parents.
But I actually found in (Upstate NY) college that the kids who had the most similar levels of life experience to me were the...NYC kids. The city enabled and outright required them to be much more independent than the more normal US suburb experience was. They'd be taking transit all over the city, many even just to get to school by middle/high school - and then after school they'd be going out with their friends to get snacks or hang out in the park or whatever.
In contrast, many of the "average" suburb peers had basically never been able to go a single place in their lives without an adult driving them until maybe they got a license at 16-17 and seemed very limited in their development for it.
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tl;dr - I think the idealized version of a suburb can be good for it, the average US suburb can't stay that way, but I also think major cities offer a lot of potential for them. Denser + walkable medium towns + nature outside them could also be good - but that's more of a EU than US development pattern.
I don't think most users were returning it because they hated the UI or even the device in the usual sense. (There are certainly issues I could detail, but they don't feel like the core problem).
The core problem is just that it just doesn't really....accomplish anything.
Once you get past treating it like an expensive Google Cardboard ("neat tech demo") - it's very hard to figure out what the point of the thing is. What problem does this actually solve for you/what thing is it actually better to use this for than other existing solutions.
Extremely high price tag with no "killer app"/function that makes anyone who tries it "get it" quickly and want one, is a pretty impossible sell.
We had plenty of options for better technologies both available and in planning, 56k modems were just the cost effective/lowest common denominator of their era.
It's not nearly as clear that we have some sort of proven, workable ideas for where to go beyond LLMs.
Approximately 92% of US households have at least one car, 59% of US households have more than one car.
The fundamental point that I am making is: Americans do not typically go to convenience stores to buy groceries, it's not even a consideration. The places most do go to buy their groceries do have fresh produce + meat and so on. They tend to just make less frequent trips and buy more at once.
Since they are getting there by car, it's also easier to buy a lot more at once.
When they get home - they also have a much larger refrigerator + freezer (possibly more than one) than is typically seen in Europe to store it in.
The bread aisle is pretty much for sliced sandwich bread (+ buns + similar things) that has preservatives to last for at least a week, and was usually not baked on site.
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I think the secondary point to note is that you're also just running into cultural differences: Americans don't really eat that much bread. And it's not a staple of meals besides 2 slices if you want a sandwich for lunch.
Hard data is shaky but most sources I can find put American per-capita bread consumption at a small fraction of the consumption of somewhere like France.
Having far fewer standalone bakeries and far less "good bread" is not so much that people are eating a bunch of worse bread instead - no one's serving sandwich bread with dinner, they're often just not eating that much bread at all.
I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.
Those stores are intended pretty much entirely for stuff people want while on the go, and the few "groceries" they stock are basically aimed at the kind of things a drunk/stoned person is craving at 3AM when nothing else is open (say, a frozen pizza), or the few things you might run out of by surprise in the morning/when about to eat and be willing to greatly overpay for being able to grab somewhere close by before your meal/schedule is ruined. (ex: milk, condiments, maybe eggs).
We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
Early net metering schemes were often basically 1:1. You supply a kWh mid-day where it's not worth much and that's "equal" in value to you drawing a kWh at 18:30, even though the market price of electricity then might be 10x what it was when you earned your "credit" and the grid is far more strained.
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Most regions that already have a decent amount of behind the meter home solar at this point exhibit a strong "duck curve" effect, at least on sunnier days. Mid-day demand is deeply suppressed while solar output is strongest.
Meanwhile, the AM/PM peaks remain and are at times of the day when solar output is very low.
With more storage - solar can help cover those peaks (+ overnight demand). Without, you're not accomplishing all that much by just depressing mid-day loads even further unless you can restructure society to better match it's energy demands to those solar supply curves.
A few illustrations/articles:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=56880
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42915
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/where-we-are-going/solar-power-... (New England).
To the extent that there is anything real to their dislike:
Poorly structured/overly generous homeowner net metering initiatives, especially for solar without storage, legitimately have escalated costs for everyone else in some regions.
The excessive subsidy given to those homeowners for power that's often not very valuable (as it comes primarily at a time of day that's already well supplied) comes from somewhere, and somewhere is....the pockets of everyone who doesn't have home rooftop solar.
And those people are typically poorer people in rented, denser housing than the average homeowner.
Most places have been moving to correct this mistake for the future (ex: CA's "Net Metering 3.0"), but that also gets pushback from people who wanted to take advantage of that unsustainable deal from the government or who incorrectly think it's a part of general anti-renewable pushes.
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Aside from that, in regions known for production of coal/oil/gas or major processing of, it's seen as a potential threat to jobs + mineral tax revenues that are often what underwrite most of their local/state government functions.
While there are plenty of job creation claims for renewables, it doesn't take a genius to see that they don't appear to need all that many workers once built, and that the manufacturing chain for the solar panels or wind turbines is probably not to be put in places like West Virginia, Midland TX, Alaska, etc.
If there's considered to be a mistake here though, I'm guessing it's going to be spending too long before committing to the initial diversion.
Without knowing the weather they were seeing at the time, seems hard to say if they should have gone for a closer 2nd alternate than Manchester.