This is what’s actually meant by the “invisible hand.” They pushed prices past what the market was willing to bear, and lost sales as people made do without. Now they’re adjusting prices back down, because it makes more sense to accept a smaller margin and make it up in volume. It’s a textbook example of the demand curve in action.

When market-based systems work, they work fairly elegantly. It’s the cases where they break down that I get concerned with.

If I recall, it’s between 3x and 10x as expensive to build buried lines versus overhead, tending more towards the high end of that number in existing built-out neighborhoods where there’s a lot of existing stuff in the right-of-way that needs to be removed or worked around somehow.

The real problem that folks have been bringing up is for-profit electric utilities ignoring line maintenance and instead just pocketing as profit the funds that should have paid for that work. Lots of folks in my area have noted that the utility used to regularly trim trees near the lines, but that work basically stopped after it merged into a larger regional power company. Even when people would call to report branches basically draped over the lines, the utility would ignore the issue.

For what it’s worth, I live in a relatively small pocket where power is provided by a county public utility, and the outages in our area were much less severe and power was restored to all but one or two people within a day. The utility board is far from perfect, but in this case they performed significantly better than their for-profit peer around us.

I’ve got the good fortune to have an >800 credit score, and even the offers I’ve seen from “status symbol” card issuers have had bonkers-high interest even when the Fed was holding the prime rate close to zero. The lowest I’ve ever seen was still around 15%, and even at that “low” rate you’d have to be truly desperate to carry a balance. Even unsecured personal loans tend to carry interest rates at half of what a credit card offers.

I exaggerate – but Magic Rock is doing booming business installing strings of natural gas generators at Buc-ee’s across the state, and I’m currently dealing with an institutional client who wanted to provide backup power for a satellite campus, and didn’t even stop to consider battery-backed PV on the way to asking for a natural gas generator farm.

If it ain’t leaking that means it’s empty, etc…

My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.

Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.

It’s not a coincidence that Texas is a hotbed of development for “microgrid” systems to cover for when ERCOT shits the bed – and of course all those systems are made up of diesel and natural gas generator farms, because Texans don’t want any of that communist solar power!

I’ve got family in Texas who love it there for some reason, but there’s almost no amount of money you could pay me to move there. Bad enough when I have to work on projects in the state – contrary to the popular narrative, in my personal opinion it’s a worse place than California to try and build something, and that’s entirely to do with the personalities that seem to gravitate to positions of power there. I’d much rather slog through the bureaucracy in Cali than tiptoe around a tinpot dictator in the planning department.

Through the course of my career I’ve somehow lost office space as I’ve ascended the corporate food chain. I had a private office/technician room in my first job out, then had an eight foot cubicle with high walls, then a six foot cubicle with low dividers, and then the pandemic hit. The operations guy at the last place was making noises about a benching arrangement after RTO, like people were going to put up with being elbow to elbow with Chris The Conference Call Yeller and Brenda The Lip Smacking Snacker while Team Loudly Debates Marvel Movie Trivia is yammering away the next row over.

Hell, if it meant getting a space to myself with enough privacy to hear my own thoughts I might consider giving up my current WFH gig. But everybody’s obsessed with building awful office hellscapes and I don’t have the constitution to put up with that kind of environment.

As fun as it is to dunk on Elmo I think we both know it’s not the seat foam that’s the problem there. 😅

I’m actually right now in the process of developing design criteria for a battery testing lab, and as part of that I had to do a hazardous materials analysis. Lithium as it is in batteries is considered a water-reactive chemical, and the code only allows you to have ten pounds of it in a building before you’re pushed into a special hazardous occupancy type with lots of extra fire and explosion precautions required. I ran the numbers and figured out that’s about 8000 of your typical cylindrical cells – which is right about the number of cells in a Model S. And in a Model S, you’re just kinda… sittin’ on 'em. Fun thought…

Here’s a direct link to the study. Of note is that there wasn’t a significant trend in detected levels by year (odd, since you’d expect the amount off-gassed to decline over time), but that electric cars in the study had ~10 times lower levels of the chemicals being studied. The authors note that this may be more an effect of vehicle brand since most of the electric cars in the study were from one unnamed manufacturer (probably Tesla?) but it suggests that even within the current regulations there are ways to reduce exposure.

I’d like to see the scatter plot for detected levels by year of manufacture, and maybe it’d be good to extend the study’s coverage of vehicle age a bit further, because the lack of a noticeable trend doesn’t jive with my intuitive sense of what ought to be happening. That said, it’s a reasonably solid study, I think.

The “I’m gonna give you $100 to fuck off” school of military strategy.

Stumbling across Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog on the Atlantic (I think the first post of his I read was about him making a character in SW:TOR, come to think of it) was my first step on the road to understanding the huge racial disparity in equity and justice in America. I even subscribed to the magazine on my Kindle for a while, but when they put up their paywall my digital subscription didn’t count, they’d shut off their comments ages ago (taking with them a lot of nasty for sure, but also squelching the communities that had sprung up around TNC and a few other writers like Alexis Madrigal), and the normal churn of writers meant that most of the folks who I like to read had moved on anyway, so I did too.

Once in a while I see an article I’d like to peruse from them, but it’s just not worth the cost of admission anymore.

USB-A is only rated for 1,500 mating cycles, whereas USB-C is supposed to last for 10,000… Though in reality the ports on my phones seem to start getting too loose to hold the jack in at around 1,000 cycles. Still, it’s not a totally unreasonable standard, and any device that hasn’t been designed to be thrown away should have ports broken out onto replaceable subassemblies – as is the case with many business-class laptops, for instance – so replacing a failed USB-PD port shouldn’t be too much trouble.

I installed KDE Neon on Friday evening and things were going great, everything was testing well, and Saturday game night with the gang went flawlessly, but this morning the VMWare Horizon Linux client spontaneously decided that it didn’t want to accept mouse input anymore, so after ten minutes of troubleshooting I gave up and booted back into Windows so that I can be productive today.

A battle lost, but the war is not over yet.

Worth noting that Outlook the Office suite component, and Outlook, the freebie mail client that comes with Windows, are not the same thing. They’re just named the same because yadda yadda executives yadda yadda name recognition yadda yadda brand synergy.

Unless your employer is one of the very few that doesn’t provide Office to its users, this isn’t about the version you are required to use.

What’s got me is, why bother with the legal system? Just call up the Texas National Guard into federal service and order them to enforce the law as regards Border Patrol’s access to the border. If they refuse, court martial ‘em. Either way, Border Patrol gets access to the border to cut down Texas’ illegal barriers, and Abbott gets an unsubtle reminder about how the states are subordinate to the federal government. Win-win scenario.

"We’re not colluding with our competitors to fix prices on rental units, we all use a third party service to collude for us" is such a bullshit legal excuse that I’m shocked they even floated it.

With old masonry wall construction, you need to be very careful about how you retrofit insulation to the walls. Insulating the interior makes it very likely that you’ll have moisture-related degradation of the stone and grout making up the wall, as you’re cutting off drying potential from the interior side of the wall. If it’s possible, insulating the exterior is your best option, otherwise you’ll need to be very conscious about selecting vapor-open insulation and finishes on the interior side, which will limit your options considerably. This article from Building Science Corporation goes over some of the details, and offers some options for interior-side retrofits that might not cause the wall to fail down the road.

Even if their military is a cesspool of corruption and incompetence that lacks the real-world capacity to invade a wet paper sack (something that I wouldn’t take for granted even if the rumors and reports about it are true, given the sheer volume of men and materiel China has to throw at an enemy nation regardless of quality), China at war with Taiwan would create a global economic crisis, between shipping disruptions in the Pacific and the knock-on effects of isolating China economically in retaliation.

Really, the best thing for everyone would be for Xi exit stage left somehow and be replaced by someone with less imperialistic ambition, but for the moment he seems fairly secure in power, which is why we’ve seen Western nations making efforts to decouple their economies from China, and more overtly signal their support for Taiwanese independence.

Older variants of the 737 are some of the most ubiquitous aircraft in the world, with very solid safety records. The 737 MAX, however, is the product of a Boeing much diminished in terms of engineering mindset, and it shows badly.