SomeoneSomewhere @ SomeoneSomewhere @lemmy.nz

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2 yr. ago

Sorry, could have been clearer. I was talking about random dumb civilians.

Quadcopters have been buzzing military bases for years, basically since they became available to the public.

With all this PR about drones and people sometimes blaming the military, the number of dumb civilians thinking about 'spying' on military bases will be on the rise.

"We have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle," the spokesperson said. "This is not a new issue for us. We've had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It's something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited."

It's not explicitly stated, but my read is they get normal consumer-style quadcopters regularly, and this is simply a continuation of that. Perhaps an increase because people are now trying to explicitly spy on the military.

The public drone sightings, on the other hand, definitely don't seem to be consumer quadcopters. They mostly look suspiciously like 737s, V-22s, or out of focus stars.

That sounds entirely like a store configuration thing.

It can vary depending on how the store sets the machines up. I'm on the wrong continent to use Walmart ones, but there's definitely variation in how paranoid and slow they are set here.

I feel it's one of those cases where if you're familiar with them and can think like the person who designed/programmed them, it can work pretty well. If you get confused by unfamiliar card terminals or a phone doing an update, you're in trouble.

E.g. it uses an expected weight and tolerance for products going into the scales. If this is produce you've just weighed, it's going to be pretty precise. Same goes for something really light like a toothbrush; a 50% margin on tens of grams is still not much. If it's a prepacked bag of oranges, then the weight could be way off (add a whole orange over the expected weight) so it won't alarm on e.g. you putting a reusable shopping bag on the scale with the oranges. This lets you skip the annoying use-your-own-bag process.

Knowing and remembering which is the next button to hit helps a lot.

I find they're fine for <5 items especially if the store is busy, but for a full trolley, you're better off with a lane just for staging reasons.

Choice of sub seems a bit weird?

It's always mass production. They're not making them by the millions. Messing around with glass and vacuums is a pain

It was an attempt to derail California (and other) High Speed Rail.

Why would you build HSR if there's something way faster/better/cheaper, you just need to wait 5 years? You're going to look really dumb if you spend tens of billions on infrastructure intended to last more than a century, and then it's obsolete before it's complete.

Similar story with Toyota perpetually claiming to have amazing batteries 3-5 years away, making every EV look like an expensive waste with no resale value.

And a hydrogen economy, small nuclear reactors, or fusion power being 5/10/20 years away, removing the need to invest in transmission and generation.

A major paradigm shift being right around the corner makes people choose short-term solutions, because you want to wait for the new thing to arrive before investing in 'old tech'.

The problem is most of it is lies, perpetuated by those selling the short-term-fix old tech.

There's a good chunk of the world where you don't ever have to water lawn, except when initially seeding it.

Apparently they kept saying things like 'long-term investment is important and private companies are bad at that', 'worker productivity is harmed by poor health and education', 'strong urban planning is necessary'.

Fibre needs bigger bend radii proportional to the cable size, but they're still rarely over 15mm diameter cables so you can bend them in like 150mm.

Once you start getting to 11kV MV cables, they do like 2m bend radii.

In NZ, David Seymour at least axed the old Productivity Commission (which his own ACT party founded) to create his new Ministry for Regulation.

Apparently they didn't like the answers they got out of the previous version.

Yeah, directional thrusting is a thing. It was used a lot when contractors were installing NZ's new fibre network about a decade ago. I don't think it's in as widespread usage for power because power cables tend to have much wider bending radii.

Regular trains don't run underground. Lots of opencast mines exist .

Basically all mines have an above ground terminal where whatever you mined is unloaded from your underground trains, lifts, haul trucks or whatever else onto storage piles, then loaded onto the actual long distance trains.

If the mine entry is up a mountain, then the trip down from that point will be a net energy producer regardless of anything else.

Two religions is not more statistically significant than one.

Referring to yourself in the third person and acting like this comes off as extremely condescending.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are electrified railway lines doing the same. Regenerate large amounts of energy into the grid while descending loaded; consume a relatively small amount of energy to haul the empty train back uphill.

If you're thinking of that CGI crane lifting concrete blocks, it's unfortunately a really bad idea.

Pumped hydro stores energy by lifting weight uphill, instead. Water is basically the cheapest thing you can get per tonne, and is easy to contain and move.

To store useful amounts of energy using gravity, you need pretty large elevation differences and millions of tonnes of mass to move.

I expect structural life of the tunnels isn't much longer than the services within them, especially with roads above.

Boring through rock is super slow and expensive, plus now your tunnel needs to be big enough to walk & run machines through, and needs aircon to keep it cool. It is done, but usually only in CBD areas where you need lots of cables and room for future expansion. Google 'cable tunnel' and you'll find lots of examples. Trenching machines go through very expensive consumable digging teeth whereas bucket trucks are just a fancy forklift, burning fuel and needing hydraulic & engine maintenance.

With high voltage cables, the (really thick) insulation gets really expensive, plus you need more conductor (copper/aluminium) because the insulation needs to stay cool. Aerial lines are directly air cooled (better cooling), and can run hotter, because the limit is the metal getting too hot and sagging, not the plastic degrading. Glass insulators are only needed at every tower and can be easily replaced.

Because keeping the conductor small is important, you need to use expensive copper rather than cheap aluminium for cables.

You also need regular joints which are very labour intensive, because they have to be perfect and you can't make a cable the full length because you can't ship a drum that big.

If a cable fails, fixing it is much harder than fixing an aerial issue. There was a cable fault in LA in 1989 that took 8 months of round-the-clock work to fix. When a tower falls over (usually because of slope failure or undermining), temporary structures are usually up in a couple of days.

Digging trenches under roads is much more invasive than pulling cables over roads, and rivers are even worse to deal with. It's very common for underground cables to be converted to overhead when they cross a river before heading back underground.

The Western HVDC Link between Scotland and England was built as an undersea cable because it's so hard to get planning permission and land rights to do major projects in the UK, as High Speed 2 found out.

Yeah, we have lots of underground services here in NZ. It's when you start getting to low population densities that you start having trouble doing it.

Plenty of cities have 'steam tunnels' used for far more than just steam pipes, and sometimes no steam in there at all. It's an awesome solution where you have reasonable density, and especially for within a facility/campus.

I don't think you're going to see it happen in surburban streets. It's the tyranny of the car.

I can't find the exact shot, but I used to have a picture of the 220kV lines parallel to the Desert Road as my desktop background. Something like this:https://johnmathews.smugmug.com/Nov-18-Desert-Road-North-Island/i-CkSm5tK