bobthepanda

Local gov can only prop up so long as they have money; and their balance sheets are strained due to ballooning debt funded by a deflated property bubble.

The automatic system will fail at some points so manual dispatch is needed, which is how this all happened

Chinese brands are all relatively young and even healthy looking major companies have a habit of spectacular sudden failure due to less good bookkeeping and auditing practices.

Trains take a long time to stop even at moderate commuter train speeds because they are so heavy, let alone high speeds of 300km/h+.

At least one of the failures here is that the dispatcher authorized such a high speed, in other systems I am familiar with, generally the procedure with a signal fault is to crawl at a speed such that the train can stop in line of sight distances.

In fact, that is the Spanish protocol, which for some reason was bypassed by dispatch even after the train driver had questioned it:

> Under normal protocols, the driver would be expected to continue moving at a maximum of 40km/h according to their line of sight, and not at normal speed on a track designed for speeds of up to 200km/h.

not an instacart user, but as a carless person an ebike has really saved me hundreds of dollars on DD fees just by doing pickup, and it really shortens the amount of time; even a very slow biking pace of 8mph is orders of magnitude faster than walking. and with bike panniers you can carry two grocery bags' worth of stuff. a decent ebike assists up to 20mph.

basically the only things i bother online delivering grocery wise are bulky dry goods (e.g. paper towels)

The original comment is clearly an expression of schadenfreude.

WA conducts vote by mail like this, and it works fairly well; we’ve had scantron technology for decades at this point.

It’s time and labor intensive and you generally need to compensate focus groups for their time. Sometimes that overlaps with laziness or apathy, but who hasn’t worked on something and been told the business can’t afford the time or money to do it right?

The research and guides went out of fashion because actually methodically studying users costs money. I worked at a place that allegedly prioritized design and was really trying to launch more redesigns but also somehow kept losing positions for designers.

Its basically a drop in the bucket. If you look at five year plans the nuclear share is continually dropping.

By 2030 there is 110GW planned of nuclear and 2800GW of solar and wind.

At this point there isn’t much additional space you could dam without adverse impacts. The flood barriers for New York at the mouth to the Atlantic were rejected both for being too costly and for screwing everyone outside the dams.

It’s not even that it’s overregulated but that the amount of power it brings online at a time is just too big.

Individual wind turbines aren’t very big, solar panels get laughably small, and while they are not efficient at their small form factors they are very easy to scale up and down. Nuclear is the exact opposite, representing a very large single point of failure, and even under pre-renewables hard to absorb; some of the first pumped hydro was developed to take excess nuclear capacity because it cannot scale up or down very easily.

Also, it is a good idea to see where Chinese leaders are expanding focus to see what their thoughts on viability are.

Nuclear has declined as a share of power being built out in 5 year plans. The projected output of nuclear in 2030 is 100GW vs 2800GW for solar+wind.

The Chinese strategy right now is to just massively overbuild renewables so that even fallow periods generate a substantial amount of energy.