My small town resurfaced (grinding and re-paving) 5/12ths of a mile for about $100,000. That's about $240,000 per mile. Or actually $120,000 per "lane-mile".
However, we could only afford it because we got a grant from the state. Our annual town budget could not afford the road maintenance.
That’s not that expensive, as long as it’s a planned expense.
An acre of land which is large for a town is 43,560 square feet or 208’ x 208’ though you can get significantly narrower along a road. A mile is 5280’ so ballpark that’s 25 per side or 50 properties = 4,800$ per property every say 20 years or 240$ per year.
That stretch of road serves 40 houses. So paving every 20 years works out to $125/year/house. Median home value is $105,000 so that costs 0.12% of home value per year.
Not unreasonable if planned for and if other expenses are not chewing up all property tax revenue.
If it winters, you are going to want to pave more often than that. My parents suburban street has similar traffic (read: 40 people driving their car out then back in every day and that's it), and just from the warming and contraction over the course of the year the asphalt starts buckling and falling apart in less than 5 years.
Those numbers are inline with my development where we maintain .9 miles of private road with HOA dues; the quotes we've received all orbit around $250-300k for the last several years. Yes we have hard winters.
What we don't have is frequent heavy vehicles at speed. The state actually bans certain types of commercial vehicles on specific roads in the spring when road beds are soft.
The figures cited in this story seem high. Or maybe they're normal in Illinois or some other state where costs are extraordinary. Their not in line with what I see.
We also have a one-time purchase option. Although it starts at $6,000. We serve a lot of larger businesses with higher volumes, like Six Flags or Fry's Electronics, and email service providers.
It's been a huge value for me, and I get a ton more done with it. No joke, I would pay $100/month. (See my other comment about this article for how its been so valuable to me.)
I've been using focusmate for four months. It's been absolutely revolutionary for me. (I work remote at home, so YMMV.)
Here are some of the ways:
(1) I’ve been getting a ton more done and feeling better about it.
(2) It really does help me focus. I hardly ever get distracted from the task at hand. I used to get distracted a lot.
The focus does not come from being watched, but because I’m "working together" with someone else, and I don’t want to let them or myself down. And because of the built-in break/recovery schedule. It's like a hack for my brain.
(3) I schedule back-to-back sessions, so I have 50 minutes of 100% focus and then 10 minutes between. In the 10 minutes I use the bathroom, get coffee, clear my head, walk around, or stretch. These things I’m sure help enable the 100% focus for the 50 minutes. I don’t feel as worn out at the end of the day (and I get more done).
(3) Declaring my goal for the session at the beginning and then reporting on it at the end has caused me to become much more realistic about how long things take.
(4) Being more realistic about how long things take has made it possible to plan out my week. I’m now planning my day and week in "focusmate session sized blocks" of work. I do have to adjust the plan, but making the plan has been a huge help.
(5) Setting a focusmate appointment in the morning causes me me to get started at a constant time — for the first time in my life. Knowing that someone else is relying on me to be at the session makes me show up.
(6) The little bit of social connection helps working at home to not feel lonley.
It's like the Pomodoro technique, but with peer pressure of the Pomodoro timer being disappointed if you bail. Not wanting to let someone else down, even a stranger, I can see how that would help you stick to it. Brilliant!
You're right! Most of what I described is common to the Pomodoro technique. I was never able to stick to the Pomodoro technique. The accountability of the timer being a person is huge.
It's weird (but true) that disappointing a random person is more motivating to me than doing what I told myself I would do.
If you don't enforce a trademark you can loose it. So this is probably helping protect their trademark.
And this also draws attention -- in a potentially viral way -- to their brand and the fact that velcro is distinct from and perhaps better than "hook and loop".
If she inherited it evenly with two other siblings and did not put any additional money down, then she has a loan-to-value of 66% (meaning 33% equity). That greatly reduces risk for the lender.
Does any electric car have an option where you can place a portable gasoline generator in the frunk and then trickle charge the battery while you drive on a road trip (with appropriate venting of exhaust).
If not, why not?
I've seen very small, quiet gasoline generators. I would think this could solve this problem easily at the expense of a small amount of storage space.
Yes, that's the effect. But I'd only have to carry the generator portion when needed for a road trip. You could perhaps even rent it only when you need.
Even if the generator was in a small trailer, that would provide the range freedom without loosing the storage space (and help with venting/cooling/noise).
True, except the road trip case is also the case where you want more cargo capacity than is standard. A rental trailer for one week that lets my wife pack the kitchen sink actually makes sense.
Weight probably isn't a problem - a Chevy Volt weighs a lot less than a Tesla S.
You don't even save much by keeping the gas tank mostly empty when you aren't expecting to need it -- the gas weighs ~6 lbs / gallon, so you might save 50 lbs by keeping the tank on 1/4 when you aren't planning to drive past the battery range.
Think about it this way: batteries are really heavy, and the Tesla has like 5x more battery capacity than a Volt. Meanwhile, if you're mostly making short trips, you're hauling around 3/4 of those heavy, heavy batteries as a contingency.
Not portable generators--which you'd really want built in for various safety and venting reasons. But you're basically describing a plug-in hybrid. The case against these is that you still carry over at least some of the complexity/maintenance of having an ICE.
You don't need much power to keep a car going on the freeway. If I can extend my drive from 200 miles to 700 miles before I have to stop and recharge - well that is as far as a human can drive in a day anyway (many humans have driven farther - it wasn't safe they were just lucky).
It doesn't take much energy to keep a modern car moving at highway speed. With regenerative braking and a limited top speed a small generator should be able to keep the car moving well enough.
I wear Etymotic Noise-Isolating Earphones in my ears (they are real earplugs with a small hole in the middle through which sound is piped), then I put Bose noise cancelling headphones over my ears, and then I play a rainfall noise through the Nose-Isolating Earphones. This multi-layer approach this works very well for me. The rainfall noise is not distracting to me the way music can be.
I have excellent hearing, and it's impossible for me to solve this problem with a completely passive or noise cancelling approach. Ears will increase their sensitivity until they are able to hear something.
I’ve used the Etymotic, but tend to go back to my Shures. On top of that, I’ll run the active noise cancelling headphones - a pair of Sony’s which function without audio. Depending on my mood, it’s white noise (actually a custom pink noise created in an iPhone app), or music. With the Pink noise, even without the active noise cancellation, I’m oblivious to the world.
looking at those earbuds, it seems like they are long enough that they would protrude out of my ear canal and bump up against the Bose headphones. This would mean they are actively pushed into my ear-holes and be highly uncomfortable.
Am I misinterpreting how long it is from the tip of the earbud to the "butt" of the earbud? It looks like it would be about 1.5 cm. How long is it?
Stand-alone ScreenHero sharing is smooth as butter -- truly amazing. Controlling a remote computer feels local.
Right now I'm using the slack-integrated "ScreenHero", and it's really laggy. This is super disappointing, and painful to use. It's actually making the mouse pointer of the person sharing lag for them.
Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.
> Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.
Given the shitty performance of the Slack desktop client (which basically only does IRC with gifs and emoji), I'm not too confident in their ability to improve the performance of, well, anything.
It's a native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Slack, Facebook, etc. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.
Also, given that it's not open source, I can't trust it with my private Slack teams. I would seriously consider making the source open. You can still charge for it (and I'd love to pay for it!), but I need assurance that it's not doing anything untoward. Perhaps a Patreon level that includes source code access?
Having the source but not building it yourself doesn't rule out that the compiled app actually has different source than the code you got. So having the source but having it rely on some complex or irreproducible build system is not enough for open source here.
That's like claiming that World of Warcraft is only 4MB because that's how big the launcher is. It also creates folders in the wrong place[0] (1 directory above %APPDATA%).
Good catch, thanks! Will be fixed in the next release. I'm not good with Windows stuff.
I don't agree with your WOW example. The browser is downloaded only for authentication, it's not used after that. The actual app is indeed 4 MB, and it has minimal CPU/RAM usage, unlike web browsers and WOW :)
Yes, downloading 50 MB for authentication sucks, but you still get a light native app.
> If you currently use Screenhero, you’ll need to migrate your team to Slack before December 1st, 2017. At that point, the stand-alone Screenhero app will no longer work — but you can enjoy the same features in Slack.
Sounds like they already have their plans set in stone.
If anyone from Slack is reading, I'm respectfully asking that they change the sunset date or invest the engineering effort to fix the performance regression before the sunset date.
Perhaps management didn't know how much of a downgrade this was.
Late last year and early this year we used Screenhero daily. It was free, so I didn't expect too much, but my team had various connection issues daily on various OSs and locations. I stopped using it despite it being smooth as butter when it worked (which was 80%+ of the time).
Hopefully Slack's acquisition helps/helped them with those apparent scaling issues.
I tried so hard to make screenhero work for me in 2015. It's smooth when it works, which is sometimes and for an hour at a time. Basic things like keypress replication were so buggy that I consider them unfinished - keyboard events would just be dropped on the wire and be careful not to type too fast or yur cde wll ome out ike thi!
I'm sure it's all fixed now as the Slack experience itself is robust.
Why has "smooth as butter" become such an overly used phrase in the tech world? Listening to the last Apple product release I must have heard the word butter a few dozen times.
I don't know about anyone else but this phrase is really starting to annoy me. It's overly used, and the word "butter" in my mind is closer to "greasy", like "don't touch it with your finger because it'll get slimy and you'll have to wash your hands". Can't you just say "smooth" or "without any perceptible lag"?
"Smooth as butter", "smoother than butter", "butter smooth", et al is a common western phrase. It's as old or older than the King James Bible itself (Psalms 55:21 if you're curious). It's a quintessential English idiom.
there was also a 'Project Butter' designed to make Android 'Buttery Smooth' a few years back - I think the high level of application of this idiom to video rendering specifically took hold at that point..
In my company's contract, we limit our liability to the amount paid by the client. Without a liability limitation clause in the contract, you're taking on a potentially unlimited amount of liability in each project. It's not worth the risk. A few good paragraphs in the contract make all of the difference in the world. If you don’t have a liability limiting clause, you should.
Also, this client engagement started going wrong from the very beginning, when the team allowed so many changes for free, and even launched the website without final payment.
I'm all in favor of over-delivering -- and I probably also would have fixed the problematic PSDs for free -- but 294 hours of work on a 116 hour project, launching the website without the required final payment, and then continuing to do work is way too much.
In my company's contract, we limit our liability to the amount paid by the client.
The amount paid by the client in this case was $12k so that wouldn't have changed anything except perhaps the scary lawyer letter (which they successfully deflected).
launched the website without final payment
This was perhaps the biggest mistake here. It would have been much better to fire the client: "OK, we're done here. You're fired. We're keeping your deposit, ceasing work and not launching your site."
How do you fire a client? What's your contract clause read that allows this? The challenge (as I see it), is that if you're contracted to perform X work for Y cost, if you 'fire' the client, you're the one breaching the contract and thus liable for a claim? What language do you use to 'fire' the client?
The contracts our company uses do include a limitation of liability to the amount the client pays.
I agree that the big mistake we made was to allow so many changes for free and also to launch the site prior to final payment being received. I have policies in the company against both of those things, but my project managers have a strong incentive to be lax on them. If they raise a flag, it will result in an unhappy client and an unhappy manager and they will be caught in the middle. It is easier for them to just push stuff through and hope it goes unnoticed. This has been a difficult issue for me to resolve and I am still trying to figure out better ways to incentivize my team to avoid this. It's a bit of a balancing act.
However, we could only afford it because we got a grant from the state. Our annual town budget could not afford the road maintenance.