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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • This is not about quality and costs

    It is about quality and cost for the majority of purchasers that worry about meeting a budget. Virtually anybody making purchase decisions on some sort of surveillance system will grapple with that issue. My point is that we all tend to want the best performance for the least cost, and breaking that habit for the less tangible purposes of domestic security or human rights somewhere else is why we will continue to see these articles about Hikvision/Dahua cameras getting deployed at times and in places they probably shouldn’t.







  • I follow a couple of channels on youtube that post replays of interesting radio communications between pilots and air traffic control. There are technical issues that cause departing flights to return to the airport virtually every single day. Electronics, landing gear stuck down or stuck up, engine stall, engine fire, flaps jam, a sensor says something unexpected. Every brand of airplane imaginable. Pilots are trained to navigate every possible failure mode a plane can encounter. Getting permission to carry commercial passengers requires an incredible level of training and testing. Commercial planes are rigorously engineered.

    I’m not trying to carry water for Boeing, but this article describes a relatively common operation (as far as I can tell).



  • I’m confused. Are Feiglin, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich not Israeli?

    Quotes from a right-wing Israeli get together in January isn’t completely out of context, but it is pretty out of context for a reaction article to something in June.

    Him quoting Hitler isn’t even the main issue in this case

    I think it sort of is in the context of this article if the author is seeking a response to cite.

    Lastly, if there are not a lot of public quotes condemning this coming out of Israel, for them to quote, isn’t that itself kind of a problem?

    Sure, that is possible. But you would assume someone citing Hitler in Israel would get some sort of response, so not touching that at all seems like an omission. Yanis’s thoughts on that are less interesting to me than a random Israeli teenager on Omegle. Also, this Feiglin person seems to have last held office in 2015 (I don’t know, just a quick Google), which might be useful context. I want to know if this nutter has any hope of grasping political power, or if he’s the equivalent of Rush Limbaugh.











  • My perspective…in the US, EVs are at the tipping point of displacing ICE on cost and practicality. Battery research plus scale production of batteries will only push that forward from here. Average car in the US is ~13 years old. If we’re looking out 15 years to the entire US fleet of cars transitioning to EV, that’s a staggering change in energy delivery…largely paid by joe six-pack buying their next car. More on that in a minute.

    I have no idea where battery recycling/reuse will end up, or whether vehicle/grid storage will play out, but I am fairly confident that there is economic value that will be extracted at the end of the car’s lifespan or the battery pack’s lifespan in that car. So…joe six-pack’s rational big battery EV purchase today not only completely rewrites US energy consumption in the next decade, it bought enough grid storage to meaningfully push through intermittency concerns of renewables.

    Meanwhile, in my area of the country that has extensive mass transit networks, the outlook is bleak. My state subsidizes mass transit that primarily takes residents to another state for work, where they pay taxes to the other state, then primarily consume services in the home state. The federal government takes way more in taxes than it sends back to the state in support or services. Occasionally, federal democrats take control and send a bone, that gets yanked as soon as Republicans are back in. My state and the public transit agency get starved, service diminished, more cars. Rationally, the other state should contribute some of those tax collections to my state’s mass transit, for efficiency, fairness, and to keep cars off the road, right? Instead, the other state imposed a gas tax that it refuses to apply to supporting transit agencies in surrounding states that send workers.

    I don’t see things getting better for mass transit in my neck of the woods. Big battery EV adoption might not be ideal, but at least it drives decarbonization and convinces masses of unsuspecting people to fund batteries that have lasting value.