AKSucks

Thing is, it wasn't just one incident, it was just one incident that resulted in a death.

When Ubers started self-driving it took just a few hours before there were videos on twitter and youtube of them driving right though red lights without a care in the world.

> He lost his eyes and face, had both of his hands amputated, and was forcibly given agonizing treatments for 14 months.

I bet this was because doctors and surgeons saw him as challenge and a career/resume builder.

Dang, I can get a countertop fryer for $180?

Fried food's on the menu, boys! Quadruple bypass, here I come.

My state gave restaurant owners a billion dollars during the pandemic. A billion dollars.

During the pandemic, restaurants lobbied hard as hell against restrictions and cheated at every opportunity what restrictions they were obliged to follow. Our governor ordered bars to be shut down around 9pm during a surge last year and everyone joked that was great because it meant apparently the 'rona only came out to infect people after 10pm.

I really wanted to meet a prospective date and we wanted to be as safe as possible. We scoured websites, google, and and social media for information about outdoor seating accommodations. Whatever information was available was exceedingly vague, despite it being a year into the pandemic when you'd think any savvy business owner would have information like that readily available. When restaurants had outdoor seating listed as available, most of them had seating fees and some insane minimum order requirements.

Fuck the restaurant industry.

> I would rather have nothing but chain restaurants owned by megacorps than have people working for less than a living wage.

Those megacorps do everything they can to pay as little taxes as possible and get as much money out of the country as they can in the form of off-shore corporations that hold the trademarks for said corp, the US subsidiary of which pays it massive 'licensing' fees.

They're also the worst at keeping money within a local economy. They use other large corporations as much as possible for 'efficiency', but it has the side effect of meaning that said business doesn't spend money for services anywhere in the local economy. Joe Drain Buster doesn't get business from Five Guys having a grease clog; some nation-wide plumbing services company does. Maybe they contract out Joe Drain Buster, but not before taking their cut.

It gets worse. The larger the employer the easier it is for that employer to grift the local, county, state, and federal government for freebies, tax breaks, eminent domain gimmes, friendly legislation and regulations, etc.

Witness: Amazon and Walmart. Companies that generated a handful of people with unimaginable wealth who fight tooth and nail to treat their employees like shit.

Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $200BN as of a month ago. The average network for a resident of Mississippi is slightly over $17,000. That means it would take roughly 11.5M Mississippi residents to equal his net worth.

Mississippi has 3M residents.

Enforcement isn't a farce, its just focused on workers because employers are powerful and workers aren't.

The reason republicans are so hardline on immigration is because "illegal" workers are really easy to coerce and exploit.

They don't call the health department when you make them shit in a hole in the field. They don't call OSHA when you deny them access to water out in the field. They don't call the attorney general when you pay them by what they pick, or only start counting their hours after they've walked half an hour to the field they're picking, and stop paying them the second they stop picking instead of when they get back to their vehicle...because you're too cheap to provide a truck or bus and they'll walk for free. They don't call the police when one of the supervisors smacks them around for accidentally damaging some equipment. Etc.

"Many economists assumed this was the fault of the labor seller for not having skills attractive to buyers"

Given the massive redistribution of wealth in the US for the last half a century it's pretty clear that's not true, and that what's really been going on is businesses have been squeezing "labor sellers" to death.

"If they can't give a decent wage [1] then they were not a viable business to begin with"

Yep. 1000%. If your workers need to be on any form of government assistance, you're being subsidized.

Mr. Factory Owner does all sorts of bullshit like paying unlivable wages, not having any employees working over the number of hours at which they'd have to pay benefits, and so on.

But guess who's always got enough money to donate to republican and libertarian campaigns, and has very strong opinions about 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' and how wasteful government assistance is?

What's exceedingly common is an focus on what they think is efficiency (or really, what they see as "waste") which they think makes them a shrewd, smart, savvy business owner.

Distrust in their employees coupled with excessive monitoring on consumables and the like, I think is the most common.

I've patronized, worked at, or know people who worked at places where the employees are doing everything they can to keep a business running despite the owner....often doing what they can to keep said owner from getting their hands too deep into daily operations or in contact with customers.

There's also the fact that Homebrew are a bunch of clowns when it comes to security.

For example, they included their repo github API key in their publicly accessible jenkins site, which meant that anyone could make a commit to the repo, which would be instantly used by anyone going forward:

https://medium.com/@vesirin/how-i-gained-commit-access-to-ho...

Buuuut hands-down the real clown-shoe reason nobody should run brew is that it modifies /usr/local to be user-writeable so they can be exceptionally lazy and install everything as the user.

Guess what's at the top of /etc/paths? /usr/local/bin.

Any script or program you run, anyone who sits down at your computer for less than a minute, can pwn you without any fancy hax0r tricks...just by adding a binary or script with the same name as a command from /usr/sbin/ or /usr/bin. You'd likely never know or notice unless you happened to run 'which', get unexpected behavior from said binary/script, or notice weird shit in ps/Activity Monitor. Imagine a script or binary that pretended to be ssh and politely passed along everything to the real ssh binary while also sending your keys, passphrases, etc to a remote host.

Have you ever tried to open a brew issue ticket? Unless you follow the exact format of their template, your ticket is deleted almost immediately.

Lat I looked the template assumed a very narrow scope of issues you could be reporting and demands an exhaustive amount of information.

I completely forgot about how immensely challenging it would be to keep the battery packs (and passengers) warm enough at the altitudes jetliners operate. Good point.

"The cool thing about electric drivetrains is that you can put this specific plane motor in a train..."

Because clearly the railroad industry has been sitting around twiddling its thumbs going "man, how on earth could we make the electric motors we've been using for a century or so, better?"

Clearly an electric motor designed for coupling to a turbine or propeller at significant rotational speeds with low/no starting torque, typical lithium ion battery pack voltages, and optimized at great cost for weight....has relevancy for a train where weight and size don't matter, there may be almost zero airflow, the motor often needs to provide massive amounts of starting torque, etc.

The railroad industry uses multiple types of electric motors for different applications. The resources companies like Siemens have in refining railway and industrial motors are far greater. The notion that they need a bunch of morons developing a one-off speed record airplane to help them improve their motor tech is absurd.

"A GE90 is not a rocket engine, nor anything else. "

And what do you suppose the GE LM9000 is? Answer: the aeroderivative gas turbine version of the GE90. Aeroderivative turbines are used extensively in electric power generation and naval power applications.

Please stop talking.

Already done with gliders via ground-based winches, which once "bootstrapped" with enough height and forward momentum are usually self-sustaining, but you have to be in weather conditions suitable for it - thermals and such.

It's wildly impractical at scale. It's not just takeoff, either. It's climb. There is no way to assist a flight up to 30,000+ feet.

Probably should have said soyuz rocket engine, my bad...though I guess it would have been more proper to say "one of the Vostok-K booster engines" of which there were four.

Or maybe GE is really stretching things and referring something other than the first stage engines.

https://www.ge.com/news/reports/its-official-guinness-world-...

100LL is a scourge, I completely agree - but I think the sense of scale is off. 160,000 planes that spend most of their lives sitting on the ground? I just don't buy that 100LL is a significant source of lead pollution beyond people who work at airports. The pollution pales in comparison to just one single cruise ship or one coal-fired powerplant.

Anyway.

A fifty-times-worse energy density is fundamentally incompatible with most powered flight as we know it, including GA. I know I earlier said "it will never work for commercial aviation" but really, it's the vast majority of aviation. It comes down to planes only being attractive because they're fast and go far, or carry people/shit somewhere more easily than one can via ground.

Commercial aviation makes things possible that aren't as possible in GA due to efficiency from scale and volume. For example, turbine engines are very efficient during flight (they're horrible idling, which is why you see them run as little as possible when not in flight), reliable, light, and powerful. They require little warm-up time so they're great for "we gotta go NOW" (emergency services helicopters for example), shock cooling isn't a problem so they can fly descents piston aircraft can only dream about, and of course they excel at high altitude operation which leads to even greater efficiency. They also scale very, very well.

They are also mind-boggling levels of expensive to purchase compared to a piston engine. They run for long periods between needing overhaul but those overhauls are expensive. They're ideal for uses where that cost can be amortized over a lot of use/sales.

There is no benefit of scale for battery flight. There is no benefit to near constant use; lithium ion degrades rapidly with cycling.

What needs to happen is a phase-out of 100LL, which should have happened decades ago; there's already plenty of piston aviation engines running on unleaded gas, like Rotaxes. I'll be amazed if it ever happens, because the aviation industry are far, far too invested into ancient engine technology and AOPA is a very powerful owner and industry lobby.

Their insistence on duplicating everything about 100LL except for the lead shows nobody's actually interested in progress, but stalling progress. If they were interested in progress, they wouldn't be trying to perfectly duplicate 100LL or using government funds to further subsidize aviation, which is already massively subsidized.

What should have happened is the EPA should have said "you have ten years until 100LL is illegal to purchase unless you're a museum operating a historically significant aircraft for the purposes of public demonstration. You have until then to develop retrofit parts to make your engines compatible with commercially available 100 octane gasoline, parts which your customers can easily install during one of the several overhauls they will have between now and then." Fuck doing Continental and Lycoming's homework for them. The air-cooled piston aviation industry are a bunch of absolute dinosaurs who have seen little advancement in technology in close to half a century.

Electric flight for commercial passenger service will never happen at commercial passenger scale.

Why? Energy density.

Lithium ion batteries store 0.8 MJ per Kg which is fifty three times worse than kerosene.

Before you say "oh well but battery tech is getting better every day" - NiMH, a technology now well over forty years old, is about 0.4MJ per Kg. Forty years of battery research has...doubled battery capacity per weight. What seems to be state of the art in commercial battery technology - LG's NCMA - is only about 15-20% ahead of what's in use right now.

It gets even more depressing when you realize that Lithium Ion is only barely getting to be one order of magnitude better than lead-acid batteries, a technology that has largely gone unchanged in over a hundred years. We need to have batteries that are a five-fold improvement from what lithium ion brought versus lead acid.

You also need a massive amount of power during takeoff and landing. GE's GE90 made about 18MW of power. The most current passenger get engine, the GE9X - produces thrust levels close to the original Soyuz rocket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Ene...

Kerosene hangs out along with other liquid hydrocarbons as the most energy per weight fuel available to us, around 43MJ/Kg. LNG is a bit better but still in the same ballpark; hydrogen is a three-fold improvement but is a net-negative fuel requiring far more energy to produce than it provides, and a royal pain in the ass to handle. It's safe because it dissipates so rapidly - but the shit loves to permeate everything. Including metal, which usually becomes brittle in the process, something severely incompatible with aviation.

Lithium ion battery packs? Barely coming off the Y-axis.

Oh, and the aviation industry can't even figure out "lithium ion battery packs for the electrical bus." Fires from said batteries in both Boeing and Airbus are surprisingly common.

It's not like I have a solution, but with a sufficiently large enough Big Employer Company in a town/city, it all but guarantees a plaintiff against won't get a fair trial when damn near everyone in town or the city is 2 or less degrees of separation from a job at that company.

In Boston the city employee to resident ratio was one of the lowest in the nation and while Thomas "Chuckles" Menino cultured an air of being a friendly grandpa patriarch who couldn't keep track of which team name corresponded to which sport...reality was that city workers were an ersatz campaign worker army, infamous for being fiercely loyal, and demanding loyalty from family and neighbors. "Are you voting for Not Menino? Because if you do, I'm gonna lose my job, Bill." There were newspaper stories about families nearly getting into fistfights over this stuff.

Menino stepped down, Marty Walsh stepped up (and promptly got involved in some scandals involving his staff pushing for union work on construction sites.) He's been appointed federal secretary of labor, so the deputy mayor suddenly was in charge. This current election cycle seems heavily focused on identity politics, social justice, etc.

It's a subject some politicians are more than happy to discuss because it sidesteps how massively wasteful and incompetent the city workforce is; nothing gets done unless you're on good terms with the "neighborhood liaison" or know someone. It's a miracle they manage to even keep their office chair seats warm. When nearby Somerville (which is basically the municipal version of the Italian mob) is more functional, that's not a good look...

After appealing and not getting a reply, did you contact them via web chat or phone and ask about the status, and request that things be escalated?

Not quite the same as an arc lamp, but in high school I did theater tech stuff for the middle school. One year the only thing the lighting rental company had for a follow spot was an HID-based unit.

It was significantly larger, heavier, and beefier than the tin-can Strong Trooperettes we had. Designed for large theaters.

It came with a huge transformer pack because it needed 220/240 power, and we were plebs with single-phase 120V.

It had an hour-meter for lamp time.

It had a start button.

Not only did it have a start button, it had startup procedures. First the fan, then power, then start. It had cool-down procedures, too.

The fan was not some cheesy shaded-poll bullshit out of an overhead transparency projector like on our Trooperettes. No, sir. A squirrel-cage blower, the kind with serious ball bearings and lots of momentum that took several seconds to spool up, with a noise that sounded like you were turning on something in a nuclear power plant.

It made a "whooMMMMM" noise when you pushed the start button from an inrush of angry pixies.

It was the coolest goddamn thing a bunch of young theater nerds had ever seen.

The whole "feud" is stupid. As pointed out, Kapoor has purposefully and publicly violated the terms of sale and Semple has taken no action. I can picture the two of them sharing a laugh together in an oak-paneled study over expensive cognac, amazed at how well the publicity stunt has worked.

Vantablank application is very difficult/technical, it has the usual nanoparticle health concerns, and it's used for defense applications like satellite optical camouflage so the company doesn't just sell it to any yahoo anyway. Kapoor went to the trouble of getting approved and his staff trained. Him getting exclusive approval to it is a yawn.

If you think Semple doesn't know that, well...bridge, NYC, etc.

Now that said, Kapoor is still a gigantic twatwaffle whose entire career could be best described as "physically executing all the stupid shit we did in POVRay as kids."

The Bean in Chicago? He forced the City of Chicago to station police around the Bean chasing down tourists taking pictures of themselves because it would violate his copyright.