turmacar

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.

Agreed. It's like how Emperor Hirohito did very important work.

Not the war. He spent the later half of his life meticulously collecting baseline data as a (rich and connected) marine biologist. It's not exactly glamorous, but that data is a significant data point on how Climate Change is affecting ocean life. It's a lot more pointed than "I swear there used to be more fireflies".

This feels like the second round of this going around as the AI articles / lazy sites pick it up.

It's a doc 'sent' to one guy who had 12 followers on medium before this started blowing up. It was edited after it was sent out to be the real marketing email of the company instead of a gmail address. The doc is still owned by that gmail account, which isn't typically how companies operate.

I guess they're getting their viral moment so good for them for generating content?

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.

Probably.

It's like how Biden's Student Loan plan was longer than the headline of "forgive x% of them" and people wrote paragraphs about how it also needed to do XYZ, without reading enough to see it did.

Source \ background

That's a compromise!