Spokane here, no one outside of a survey team would call it that.

“Inland Empire” maybe, but that’s about as specific as “Tri-Cities” or “the lake”. PNW is the tri-state area of WA/OR/ID in casual conversation.

For that they’re waiting on the paperwork to go through with Apple.

The study is talking about overall numbers of jobs, not specific companies. Get fired from McDonalds closing a location, get a job with higher pay somewhere else that’s paying the new minimum wage, is a net zero result.

McDonalds is gutted that their 2024 earnings are on track for only a 5% increase over 2023, which saw a 10% gross profit increase for the year.

Remember when there was a “shoplifting crime wave” that it turned out was just profits were down so they had to blame something?

…and they shouldn’t. It’s a government service vehicle, form and function over aesthetics.

They could’ve bought a fleet of <s3xy> EVs off the shelf but they would’n’t’ve been fit for service and more expensive per mile/year of use.

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Part of the problem is to meet their quoted throughput of passengers they would need to fully load/unload each vehicle in ~30 seconds. 4 adults in, 4 out, with luggage, with no delays or struggling. That’s… not very feasible for a commercial passenger car. They’re not designed for quick loading and unloading.

The tunnels are a single lane without a service tunnel, which the Victorians used in the 1800s for their subways. Because if a single car has mechanical issues the entire service has to stop and empty to clear it. They’re electric, so there are less mechanical systems, but they are still putting a significant amount of wear and tear on tires/axels/steering systems, all the mechanical systems they still have. Even without meeting the their goal throughput, they’re putting orders of magnitude more use on each vehicle, which are consumer cars. They’re meant to spend most of their lives parked.

If they made a “Tesla train/trolly” where the engine car was pulling a simple enclosed cart with seats it would significantly improve their throughput and loading times, and require less maintenance per passenger. But at that point you’ve just invented a train that uses significantly less efficient rubber tires on asphalt.

Tesla’s design [for Wardenclyffe] used a concept of a charged conductive upper layer in the atmosphere, a theory dating back to an 1872 idea for a proposed wireless power system by Mahlon Loomis. Tesla not only believed that he could use this layer as his return path in his electrical conduction system, but that the power flowing through it would make it glow, providing night time lighting for cities and shipping lanes.

It’s a very Victorian / Steampunk idea that is also kind of horrifying. It’s working off theories of what electricity “is” that we now know aren’t accurate, but if you try to scale them to actually working every building and tree and person is now a lightning rod.

Topsy was also electrocuted at the request of the ASPCA because otherwise she was going to be hanged and it was seen as more humane, which always seems to get left out.

To clarify, Edison wasn’t trying to ‘disprove’ Tesla, the War of the Currents was Edison vs Westinghouse. Tesla didn’t invent AC, he would’ve learned about that in engineering school, he invented the 3 phase motor, which made AC significantly more practical. Tesla had an argument with one of Edison’s managers over pay, not with Edison. Tesla and Edison wrote each other letters later on and generally spoke positively of each other in public.

Tesla’s an interesting guy but unfortunately went off the deep end pretty steeply. His ‘death ray’ was a ‘blueprint’ he sold to his landlord instead of paying rent and is basically gibberish. Wardenclyffe tower was doomed by not understanding wireless transmission and is basically a Bond villain device. Turning the Ionosphere and Mantel in to halves of a capacitor would both take more energy than humans have ever generated and be really really really bad for anything tall and conductive, which would be basically everything with the energies involved.

“Don’t want automated looms? Stop buying clothes. Buy material and make your own, as your forefathers did. Surely your neighbors will be open to your message of time and effort instead of ease.”

Stop assuming the tragedy of the commons can be avoided by scolding the people talking about wanting to avoid it.

Half of windows settings is a button that says “additional settings” that opens up the full settings window that hasn’t changed since Win95. It’s absolutely insane that in a decade they haven’t managed to even replicate full functionality.

Yes, a return to the unstructured hellscape glory of unranked comments of yesteryear. Every thread starting with a resounding “First!!1!!”. Relevant or interesting things hidden on page 5 of 31. Spam lurking around every corner, as a treat.

Next up, Maxwell.

Turns out the secret to defeating entropy was demons all along.

Source \ background

That’s a compromise!

~2010

I remember them being noticeably louder. Unless you were in a library or a movie theater I don’t know why people cared all that much though.

In the US a few decades ago the big rail companies were given the ultimatum to upgrade their safety infrastructure or have a national speed limit of 79 mph imposed on them.

Guess which they did?

Disney is also actively arguing in court that if you use the free trial you can’t sue them for anything. Ever.

Even if years later you die in one of Disney’s hotels because one of Disney’s restaurants didn’t care about your allergy.

So there’s that to worry about now.

If you don’t care how long it takes to get there and can effectively use the ITN you don’t even need to leave going that fast.

The prequels had a mountain of books/comics/shows backing them up and filling out the parts that were lacking. ( i.e. the huge gapping holes in tone and execution ).

The sequels… there’s not much to salvage. They’re more very pretty hole than substance. To the point there haven’t been more than a handful of attempts and they’ve basically been ignored/sidestepped.

“Maybe we should have planned the trilogy” - JJ after RoS

Disney allocated a billion dollars to a trilogy of movies and didn’t even ask for outlines of scripts first. I know JJ is “mystery box guy” and all but the amount of hubris to think they could just wing it on the strength of the IP is staggering.