Just be sure when using a electric mower you opt for the higher amp batteries. They are also far more limited by wet or tall grass and heaven forbid trying both at once.
Many push mowers will come with a 4amp or higher battery while blowers, weed eaters, and such, use 2 to 2.5amp battery. While the lower amp batteries can work in the mower they will heat up faster and may actually stop if the load they are put under ramps up too fast.
Still even the cost of a 4amp or higher is well worth it to never have oil or gasoline in my garage. Just understand the limitations. I mow a little under 10k square feet which can require a recharge of one or both batteries depending on conditions.
What is more insane is that only through Class Action can this suit succeed. Why? Because as the current trick by government agencies is that if they think the court case will go against them they return the money before the ruling. This voids the case in the eyes of the court by worse puts the victim on the hook for attorney fees[0]
The US Supreme Court just recently struck this down in a first amendment case, where a university said “Hey, we changed the rules, you now have no standing to sue.” The Supreme Court said “There was still damage, so they still have a cause of action.”
People underestimate the impact of that case. 2nd Amendmemt cases can actually have a leg to stand on if a group is willing to push it hard enough. There's still the certiorari hurdle to traverse, but it'd be nice to see the justices set their minds to it.
4th as well as 2nd will benefit greatly from closing that loophole but it will likely take a decade or more for the courts to hand out a sufficient number of "no you idiots this is covered under our previous ruling X" type of rulings.
This trick has been going on for 30+yr. States have been using "well we gave it back u no longer have standing" to keep their unconstitutional laws out of the courts since at least the 90s.
I really doubt that by the time technology lets us build a space elevator that we would actually find it worthwhile to build it, at least here on Earth.
Instead those resources and technology development would be better used in creating the manufacturing processes needed to operate in space by mining the moon and capturing asteroids.
You don't need a whole lot of manufacturing lifted into space before you can make it self sustaining and growing of its own work.
Construction of nuclear stations in the United States instead of getting cheaper as more were built got more expensive but what is surprising is a good amount of the costs were because of poor project management. [0]
Basically last minute design changes. Having people sitting around doing nothing because their skills were not needed at the current time. You would have over crowded work areas and either insufficient or lack of tools needed to do the work.
Standardization, the same methods by which the price of solar panels plummeted could benefit nuclear as well. there is no reason as a nation a standardized design could not be created and installed with good speed and low costs.
Think of it as a modern day Liberty ship except we are freeing ourselves from fossil fuels
> there is no reason as a nation a standardized design could not be created and installed with good speed and low costs.
There is, actually, if by "low costs" we mean lower than solar. If you take a nuclear plant and remove the nuclear reactor from it, what you have left is a steam-driven generator and a firebox where the reactor used to be. That's what a coal power plant is. Coal power plants cost about twice as much per watt to build as current solar power plants, and solar power keeps getting cheaper. So it's unlikely that nuclear power plants will start costing less—to build—per watt than coal plants.
(They could of course cost less to operate per watt, since they don't have to buy fuel by the trainload or dispose of fly ash. But just the cost to build a coal plant makes it uncompetitive with solar in most of the world, unless you make very pessimistic assumptions about intermittency and the cost of utility-scale energy storage, which is, however, still an unknown.)
So, it's even more unlikely that nuclear power will get cheaper than solar power. Unless you're in, like, Svalbard or something. Or there's a revolutionary new way to build supercritical steam turbines that makes them much cheaper per watt and isn't also applicable to making solar panels. Steam turbines were invented 137 years ago and have been a big business central to the economy of every developed country for decades, so I'm not holding my breath.
Nuke plants got more expensive because that was the whole point of starting the projects in the first place: reliable long-term pipelines of corruption, graft, fraud, and kickbacks lasting a good decade, sometimes longer, providing many $billions, with no strings attached, to well-connected beneficiaries.
It is the reason small, standardized reactors never got traction: there was so little scope for corruption, they offered nothing of value for the people who could have backed them.
The same applies to any big public project in the US, of late: California's bullet train, New York's 2nd Avenue subway, Boston's Big Dig, the F-35, NASA's SLS. It has taken a long time, but the US now ranks among the most corrupt nations. Corruption is wholesale, from the top, not retail, at the bottom.
full self driving would far easier if they weren't all trying to cover all cases at once. I, along with others, have mentioned that a far simpler problem to solve is freeway travel.
HOV and Express lanes make this easy. They have well established markings, limited access, and traffic goes in one direction. So industry and regulators would work together to solve standardization of markings for travel and entry and exiting.
Then you take it to the rest of the interstate system and then to limited access highways. Eventually you get down to the neighborhoods and city driving.
I see real promise in Tesla's beta system which has a few thousand drivers. What it tracks is far more advanced than what my current software does in my 3. They finally went to a persistent model and far better labeling. Now where my car shows cones around a parked vehicle they show the vehicle as well. They show all parked and stationary objects. Something the current software does not always do if at all.
Just within the US the lane markings, signage, and even signaling, is not consistent from state to state. Worse the rules for what is an acceptable lane is not consistent either. So the first step there is to standardize it all across the nation.
Tesla is 100% going to win in this space. And as Musk and Karpathy have said, the general solution will be in place and work nearly everywhere, but a long tail of edge scenarios will have to be ironed out over time. This is nascent, world changing technology solving hard problems.
As a M3 owner you get to see the feature set growing over time, but the zero-to-one moment is when that FSD is finally rolled out in 9.x
What I read was, Social media bad. A part of the long running crusade of the NYT and other media that is finding itself displaced by Social media, whether existing sites or new upstarts.
The simple point is, NYT and other legacy media companies resent that they don't control the news and how it is portrayed, delivered, and worse for them fact checked. They really loathe being called out repeatedly by "upstarts" who aren't real "journalist".
There have been many editors, writers, and more, taken down in recent years that used to operate with impunity within the legacy media. No one would question them or the paper they wrote for. Now they can get caught when they cross the line or worse outright fabricate stories.
So the legacy media simply writes stories that portray social media as bad and in need of regulation, in other words, silencing.
Related : As the article mentioned, if you are a serious collector then ebay is your place. Even the most obscure of items can be found and in some cases in significant quantity to let you get an understanding on value.
oh I bet many are going to find the opportunity provided by the equipment gives them a lot of flexibility with work but also to communicate with friends and family. Many had never considered using zoom, their ipads, and other means, to keep in touch. The visual aspect may finally lead to where people will desire phones calls are both audio and visual.
maybe the video phone will become an actual reality instead of something most people only see on TV and in movies
Zoning pretty much dooms this where I live and many other places. One recent recommendation to allow tiny homes in Atlanta had the caveat, no mobile homes. They wanted housing that could not move. The Atlanta proposal was to permit them on lots that already have a home but not elsewhere.
Issues of utilities along with school load come to mind but those occur with any other dense housing. So why wouldn't apartments be better? To make it easier on residents with bad credit and such the utilities could be baked in to the rent and the state or city could offer to subsidize.
However what doomed many existing communities near me were property taxes. The land is more valuable for actual homes or in some cases businesses. With tiny/mobile homes as you propose your location may require local governments reducing the tax load to make the location affordable.
Why? Kids that return to the nest. Grandparents that come to help. Grandparents that need help. Being able to rent out your property for additional income.
I live in DC and there was a flurry of activity, with neighbors forming housing cooperatives, getting together to build up. It's possible. At least, it used to be. You talk about upzoning as if it's sensible & straightforward, & tiny home or additional separate dwelling units are weird, but they're what's in reach for a lot of people.
I'd love to see a resurgence of coop housing developments. There's so many older row houses around here, way under-developed, and I think of how much value those folks are sitting on, if only they could work with each other, & find funding & trustworthy developers to do the job. In addition to construction costs, everyone's got to go find somewhere to live for a year while the place gets redeveloped, which is costly & disruptive. Another advantage to tiny houses &c.
Moving from property tax to land value tax would readily address that last point. This would incentivize turning unused land into tiny/mobile home parks - and would further incentivize residents cooperatively owning that land in order to reduce overhead to a bare minimum.
a. That depends on who you ask. I think ours are adequately funded as well now.
b. My concern over school funding was if you cram more households into a given amount of tax, which was an explicit part of the strategy above, you create a school funding issue that wasn't there before. (I admit I was not explicit about that point and should have used another dozen words to make that clear.)
> "The Atlanta proposal was to permit them on lots that already have a home but not elsewhere."
they implemented something similar here in southern california. the reason for this is to get homeowners on board, by giving them all the control and potential income from a proposal that nominally increases housing (giving politicians a 'win' without changing much).
the problem with this kind of policy is many-fold, but most egregiously it serves to intentionally lock out non-homeowners from both homebuying (by raising prices further) and homebuilding (by keeping buildable land off the market). it's literally designed to suppress class mobility and exclude the lower classes from homeownership. it also exacerbates homelessness, misallocates capital, and ultimately stagnates an economy.
instead, we need to overhaul zoning regulations, building codes/permitting processes, and tax policy (perhaps by land value principally) to encourage subdivision and construction.
Many push mowers will come with a 4amp or higher battery while blowers, weed eaters, and such, use 2 to 2.5amp battery. While the lower amp batteries can work in the mower they will heat up faster and may actually stop if the load they are put under ramps up too fast.
Still even the cost of a 4amp or higher is well worth it to never have oil or gasoline in my garage. Just understand the limitations. I mow a little under 10k square feet which can require a recharge of one or both batteries depending on conditions.