kumarsw

PG&E screwed up pretty bad prioritizing shareholder dividends over maintenance/vegetation management. That said, their potential exposure for liability feels something like the situation which led the the demise of small aircraft manufacturing in the US. The Western US is a tinderbox, partly by nature, partly by a century of a suppression only-approach to wildfires, made worse by an ever-increasing wildland-urban interface, and partly by warming/drying of the region associated with climate change. If a fire is not started by overhead lines, there are still plenty of other sources: grills, fireworks, dragging trailer chains, lighting strikes on dead snags. Reducing the incidence of the portion of fires due to overhead lines does not come cheap and comes with diminishing returns. There are technical and operational solutions: undergrounding, new circuit breakers that can detect arcing, preventative blackouts during high winds. But this requires money from somewhere and even a large investor owned utility probably won't have it after a large settlement.

No one has bit yet so I will:

- Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter cost: $583M

- Artemis II cost: $4.1B

Manned spaceflight is the most expensive PR program ever to get money for unmanned spaceflight

Given that this is hacker news, the answers here are unsurprisingly biased towards building toys. Blocks/Duplo are great, but who is going to explore the newly built environment? Enter the die-cast toy cars/trucks/construction equipment/farm equipment. I've had good luck with the Ertl 1/50th scale stuff, which can be purchased in lots on Ebay.

Paying for a group to sit together is really just a roundabout way of charging extra for the middle seat that solo travelers don't want. There's something gross about it, creating a market price for a nonexistent good.

I don't know about their other expenses, but SEO/advertising is probably one of their better uses of money even if we don't like it. It's hard to gain market share against a browser that is pitched each time you do a Google search no matter how good the product is.

It might, or it might just become the next CAFE. Disappointingly, the proposed regulation does not apply to vehicles over 10k lbs gross weight. This notably includes heavy duty pickups, a fast growing market segment thanks to the increasing popularity of 5th wheel campers as an alternative to self propelled RVs and their exemption from CAFE. Within 5 years HD pickups will probably be the only class of vehicles available with V8s, further increasing their popularity.

Context: As of September 2024, the NHTSA is proposing that the US adopt pedestrian safety crash requirements for vehicles up to 10k lbs. North Americans may not be aware that engineering solutions already exist for medium-duty trucks such as Mercedes-Benz's line of low-entry trucks, linked here.

The original sure looks bland, but a HTML4-esque webpage gives absolutely the wrong message about the maturity level of a browser regardless of how much more usable it may be. Branding matters even if it's a tough pill to swallow.

The browser is good, but Mozilla has been consistently losing market share despite being well-funded. There is considerable debate as to what specific mistakes were made, but the foundation spent a lot of money on side projects that did not benefit the browser such as Servo, Rust and FireFox OS. Likely market share could have been improved had this been spent on marketing or engineering work that directly benefited the browser.

I dunno if it's practical, but the idea of an urban "garage" for woodworking/storing your kayak sounds kinda awesome.

Back when I worked out of an office in an industrial park in the suburbs of Boston, a number of the younger/single folks would reverse-commute in from the city. Since it was against the prevailing flow of traffic it was a pretty easy drive for them.

See my other comment - current Toyotas will let you disable the 4G modem with a series of button presses.

Adding to the list of 2010s-era Japanese cars, the 2nd gen Mazda3s have good reliability without the "Toyota tax." If you don't want to go with a 10yo car, current Toyotas will let you disable the 4G modem by pressing a series of buttons, and have physical HVAC controls. There's pretty much no getting away from touchscreens in current cars, though. The only alternative is Mazda with their selector knob, but I've found it more distracting when I rented one.