schimmy_changa

I'm getting 403s when trying to download basic census tract shapefiles. You might have the same problem / if you have regular jobs that rely on public datasets they may start failing randomly.

Looks like this might be another victim of the current administration's fun with databases (although I admit that's speculation).

Perhaps, but there's a reason that anyone in supply chain or logistics tries to standardize on the fewest SKUs as possible. Planes are a special case because weight _really_ matters and thus it's worth the loss of standardization.

Imagine the nightmare of what happens when a driver grabs the wrong bus and is several miles along their route before they notice. Do they return to the school? Do they get as many kids as they can before they run out of charge while a dispatcher furiously tries to coordinate a place within range but still further along the route to send a whole new bus to switch the kids onto? What happens when the driver who's bus got taken drives off in ANOTHER driver's bus, perhaps with the same results cascading onwards?

Currently you have to balance drivers, bus capacity, and bus breakdowns/availability, but you don't have to manage bus charge because the gas range is large enough and the driver can quickly top up if needed. Adding another dimension of complexity into it likely isn't worth it compared to the cost of having a somewhat larger battery.

Hmm very interesting response by @somat about malicious actors, and I like your point about the disappointment of web3 here.

One reason I'm not super surprised they didn't implement publishing is that it seems like there's an inherent complexity to information passing in two-way systems. See as an example the difficulty in a grid with distributed renewables or how long websockets took to come along. Consider even an economy: you bring simply money to the store, not goods that you've created to barter, because of the complexity in figuring out the value of the offered goods, the cost of the negotiation, and potential mismatches in needs.

Maybe, just like with the electrical grid, we can start to get more creative now that the costs of 'the usual way' are more well-known and can start being internalized instead of externalized - this is the case with air pollution and carbon for our electrical grid, for instance, which is helping to drive distributed generation.

hmm - it's not like trains were (or are) built for rugged terrain either. If anything that point would be in favor of Switzerland...

True for SF & LA, but many other cities depend on State Water Project water which gets used by Ag as well - it's not just small towns.

Promptly, sure - but there's a system that can be changed overall, we should have the power to do so. For instance, groundwater depletion from ag limits municipal water supplies, or other ag use uses State Water Project water 'before' it gets sent down to SoCal. The more SWP water they use, the less Colorado water they use. It is a grid, and not always fully fungible, but more connected than people think.

Right, the computers were built for the preliminary programs which ... were stages on the way to Apollo! Yes, theoretically, but sometimes you need a big bold exciting goal or everyone will say "why are you wasting my tax dollars inventing flight computers? these don't seem very valuable...". The side effects may even be the point of the project, but the goal is essential to getting the politics right.

Mostly just... the British have a LOT of history and so the stacked ranking of wars over the course of just the British Empire includes over a dozen more consequential wars than the War of 1812. The poor high school students have enough names and dates to remember!

I've read a few of his books and can also recommend them, with a caveat: Smil asserts confidently that something is infeasible or impossible, yet what he says is impossible _has since come to pass_.

The main example here is the cost of solar and wind - in his earlier books he assumes that the transition to renewables must go slower than it has, simply because solar and wind couldn't possibly be cost competitive with fossil fuels. (Yes, it's not cheaper in many circumstances, but I'm talking about cost-competitive against coal unsubsidized, for instance, something he would not have predicted would happen in the mid 2010s)

He's a fantastic historian of energy, but falls into one of Clarke's laws: _When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong_

Yes, the energy transition is very hard and will take longer than many boosters want, and the history suggests this, but he also doesn't realize that history can also be changed by _learning from_ that history.

> The videos are more ephemeral and imperfect than what you usually see on IG, and there's a lot more joy in what's being captured. It really is a step change in the ability to build communities around shared interests.

... so far. But with any technology it seems that, once the attention goes towards something, money and polish and 'Moloch' take over and the magic of amateurs and the joy of discovery are lessened. Perhaps TikTok will be different, however! It's not inevitable, but just a trend I've noticed.

Large cargo vessels do try to avoid bad weather, even though they can sail through most of it. It's a crew happiness, risk, and loss avoidance concern (knowing these companies, probably mostly the latter two!).

I was on a cargo ship in the pacific which diverted into the Bering Sea to avoid some weather instead of skirting just south of the Aleutian Islands as planned. The captain gots orders via satellite from a land crew that's crunching the numbers of risk vs extra fuel costs at all times for the fleet. The first mate was frustrated by how this all works. He said (English not being his first language): "This is terrible! We never get to decide anything for ourselves. We are like Muppets!". I think he meant "puppets"...