Great. Now do New England

Could have at least made one of them Master Chief for legit armor and bigger contrast

This guy in the image is almost as ridiculous as the woman: he’s highly visible and mostly protects shoulders and head.

We tried that during the Biden administration. Investments in chips, bringing back manufacturing, working on our century of deferred infrastructure projects, beginning to invest in the future with renewable energy and starting to do something with education.

Then the pendulum swung violently the other way. We threw it all away. Then went much further back to a dark time that never existed.

One of the reasons for Chinese success is being able to stick to a plan. How can we compete if every four years a new administration takes a bulldozer to any improvements and focuses on enriching himself and his cronies?

Typically it’s the other order, in the us. We want to build a train line but it’s ungodly expensive and legally fraught to get that right of way. However there’s a convenient highway where we already have a right of way, and there’s room for rail in the median.

I’m not convinced it’s a good idea since no one would want to use it, but it’s well-meaning people trying to get a thing done

I like that my Apple messages client can now participate in encrypted RCS chats. It’s still green boxes though. No competition, just raised the floor a little from SMS as the basic service

Is it because I don’t use an Alexa or have Fire tablets?

No. I have multiple Alexa’s, a fire stick, and used to have multiple Fire tablets. Maybe they actually follow through when you set preferences to not track

It has to be looking for trends, rather than one-offs, otherwise the list would be endless for some of us.

The one I find interesting is “prefers premium shampoo brands”. My first thought was: what? But I buy “salon size” so I don’t have to buy frequently, and my kids apparently like nice stuff, so technically true but may not mean what they think it does

Am I the only one not insulted by “about you”? Or are you guys retrieving all your data?

I’ve been using Amazon for decades but more heavily since Covid: I expect it to know a lot about my purchases. “About you” lists only 32 items and every one of them is a true fact related to my shopping. It does not show any dossier agregation or outside data. Nothing about me personally

The biggest privacy issue is knowing what type of car I drive, but I volunteered that info because I was so frustrated with their “smart” search trying to sell me similar parts for other car types

As long as they’re only using my purchase history with them, only using facts and not selling it, I’m fine with that

Upvote for the heat pump. That was actually a deciding factor for me that EVs were mature enough. I live in New England and the heat pump has no problem keeping up, although I’m getting spoiled with pre-heat. EVs tend to lose range when it gets cold, but I’ve seen stats that heat pumps cut the loss in half, and I’ve never noticed an issue.

My other criteria was 300 mile range. I don’t drive much so I might only charge once a week (in my own driveway!) up it’s enough to make road trips easy. My kid is at school two hours drive away, and range is sufficient for a weekend round trip without charging.

But is that only the Tesla model y (in the us)? It’s been several years, so you’d think others would have followed by now, but i haven’t read of it

Thanks. I’ll take a look for it. Not listed as an e-book at my library so I might have to look for a physical copy

Good point - I’m probably remembering fiction, but also Soviet Union attempting to target the aircraft

…. And we have the incidents of overflying Swedish airspace, and I think Danish

Didn’t you hear? The war is over. We “won”…… TACO sez, “ I didn’t say it, I declared it”

Satellites do have such restrictions. While you may expect the angle to be higher than for an aircraft, a satellite will not be directly overhead most of the earth. You’re still limited by angle and shadow, as well as time and frequency. Unless the target is high enough priority to reposition the satellite, it will be an oblique angle at a predictable time. While that angle will on average be higher than an aircraft, the aircraft can find different angles, at different times, with as much frequency as you like.

Perhaps some things are more visible to an aircraft from the east than a satellite from the north, or perhaps the target has camouflage procedures at the known satellite schedule but an aircraft is more likely to catch them operating

To speculate further, the stated reason for attacking Iran was nuclear weapon development. Perhaps there are sensors to track that, that can’t operate from satellite

During the Cold War, it had to overfly Russian airspace to be able to see far enough. They were within their rights to shoot at unauthorized aircraft in their airspace.

However, it could see a lot higher percentage of Iran without overflying, and Iran can’t legally shoot at something in international airspace

We know that NASA is doing research on both supersonic and hypersonic airflow. There are extremely few existing aircraft they could use for hypersonic testing

It’s fun speculation to assume this is for military reasons but remember nasa s a civilian agency. Perhaps it’s connected to their research on supersonic and hypersonic flights

Satellites are too predictable, plus too infrequent. If there are two spy satellites that cover Iran, for example, Iran can easily know when and what direction, then presumably take some effort to cover whatever they want to hide.

A reconnaissance plane can show up without warning, any time, loiter for at least minutes, take pictures from different angles, in addition to sharper imaging. We can speculate they may also have sharper non-optical imaging, such as thermal or radar

As long as there’s only a few trains and enough sidings or stations with double tracks ……

…… it’s still a fucking stupid idea and shows you how desperate they are to complete anything with the little remaining money

From various streamers focusing on that project, they’re desperate to find a way to complete something with the money they have.

There’s been a lot of time and money sunk into this project, but being stingy now forces them to entertain poor choices. This is a transformative project and We need to just fund this properly. This is time for the rest of us to step in with adequate federal financing to complete it rather than saying it is the state’s problem

As far as I understand it, their worst problems were in the planning, permitting, land acquisition stages and they’re doing better with construction but have no possible way to catch up on time or money.