I think land lines are where many current adults (who grew up before cell phones were ubiquitous) learned a lot of that common sense, because in order to get in touch with anyone you had to be willing and able to make small talk with whoever picked up the phone first - chatty mothers, asshole brothers, mostly-deaf grandfathers, etc.

But they're built by extremely skilled machinists. I've practiced engineering for decades but I wouldn't even want to be in the same room as any object I've personally made being spun up the first time.

My car can't tell the difference between a person and my backpack on the passenger seat, but it dings regardless.

I've wondered about this too.

I have a common enough name that about 2/3 of the info data brokers have on me is garbage.

If every data broker could be relied on to faithfully delete my info I would sign up for Optery or Incogni today. I don't, because if even one of those 2/3 is a bad actor I'm just expending effort to clean up their data.

Specifically, the data I don't want them to have.

Being readily accessible is a must. The point I was trying to make (poorly; it was late) was that having the horn button in the middle of the wheel is about the worst place imaginable if you lay on the horn to avoid a crash and it happens anyway, because some portion of your arm is probably going to be broken when it gets crushed between an exploding airbag and your rapidly-decelerating body.

In driver's ed they tell you to not to use your horn when you're annoyed at other drivers - only use it if there's an imminent danger to avoid a crash.

But you better hope it works because if it doesn't, the airbag behind it explodes.

...

I'm not sure Tesla improved the situation, but it definitely seems like the situation has room for improvement.

It's basically IT but for industrial operations instead of commercial.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/internet-of-things/w...

Visual Basic as a tool for building Windows programs with GUIs was pretty hard to beat though.

Maybe there are tools that churn out fully-polished react just as easily nowadays, but I wrote a janky little data visualization app in 2 hours at my internship and they ended up using it for almost 15 years.

Does that include transmission? Most population centers already have the pipeline network needed to bring them gas but the getting power from giant solar projects in the desert (where it's sunny) to the eastern interconnection (where most people live) is still an unmet need.

> as battery storage prices drop

Eventually, but at present our grid-scale storage has a capacity of ~30GW on a grid of ~1200GW; it's going to take something like a trillion dollars and a generation to build out grid-scale storage to the point where we can even support a 100% renewable grid.

We'll get there eventually but until grid-scale storage is installed and ready, the gas plants (with their fast start/stop ability) are what's enabling the renewables to come online and replace our older coal and nuke plants.

We're probably going to have to lean even more on gas since the first ~500GW of renewables are replacing existing coal/nuclear we're losing, but once the grid storage tech catches up we can start installing that in lieu of new gas plants and replacing the ones we've already built.

Tl;dr: we'll get there but not in the lifetime of a furnace

In the US natural gas is a byproduct of shale oil extraction and we have a limited capacity to move or export it so it's almost priced as a waste product.

It's unlikely that electricity will be any cheaper than gas soon either, since that's where 40% (and growing, as our coal and nuclear fleet are retired) of our electricity comes from.

I still listen to it every day because it's highly curated and has tracks unavailable on any service, but quality-wise it definitely feels like I'm plumbing the depths of a DVD collection when everyone else is watching Netflix.

Situations that come immediately to mind:

- Driving in the hurricane lane on the shoulder during an evacuation

- Reversible lanes and streets

- Sizing up an icy hill and figuring out whether it's safe to keep going

- Ferries

- Knowing a baseball entering the road from behind a parked car will probably be followed by a child

- Understanding traffic police, sign turners, "follow me" trucks, etc.

[0] https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/assets/cm/content/blog/...

- Designing a UI for resolving merge conflicts is non-trivial and a lot of the visual cues git diff viewers use to highlight conflicts (colors, marker text, etc.) don't translate well into a CAD viewer

- The Autodesks and Bentleys of the world work in proprietary binary files so any solution would only work for one vendor, and sometimes only one flavor of one vendor

Two airplane bottles in your pocket, belt loop, etc. - somewhere obvious but not too obvious - can absolutely blind a ticket taker to the 6-8 you have taped to the back of your calves.

Anyone who thought the DC-10 was in the clear after its cargo door problems were fixed was in for a nasty surprise a few years later when an engine fell off of one at O'Hare, but if the industry had written it off after that incident they'd have missed out on 35 years of an otherwise reliable plane.

Nixing parking minimums for businesses in already-walkable, transit-connected downtown cores is overdue, and areas close to that density can easily become new downtown cores when infill is allowed to cover their parking lots.

Nixing parking minimums for downtown apartments, to your point, is a terrible idea (outside the densest areas of NYC at least, where parking minimums are already effectively nil) because most transit systems in the US are designed to bring suburban commuters into the city, so even if said apartment is situated directly above a multi-modal mass transit hub, it might not necessarily connect its residents to much more than a handful of giant parking decks clustered around a freeway.

The hardware is solid and the software isn't flashy but it's reliable. It's exactly what hackers and tinkerers want, so naturally Ubiquiti has all but abandoned the entire product line.

They haven't discontinued it (yet) so I could still replace any piece of it if I needed to but their software version history doesn't exactly paint a picture of a product that's cherished or actively invested in:

2019/03/28: v2.0.1

2019/05/30: v2.0.3

2019/06/25: v2.0.4

2019/07/16: v2.0.6

2019/12/04: v2.0.8

2020/03/09: v2.0.8-hotfix1

2020/11/18: v2.0.9

2021/02/02: v2.0.9-hotfix1

2021/06/13: v2.0.9-hotfix2

2022/07/17: v2.0.9-hotfix4

2022/12/20: v2.0.9-hotfix5

2023/01/22: v2.0.9-hotfix6

2023/07/31: v2.0.9-hotfix7