They didn't misread, what they're saying is that the lead plane would detect conditions/forces that would result in a tow upset and then cut the tow tether. There's a video in this thread that shows that currently, in manned gliders, the glider pilot can and has a responsibility to release if a tow upset is happening.
No, they're both south of the Mason-Dixon line and Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Texas is considered less South, culturally, than Virginia.
>Apply for Removal: You can apply to have PMI removed if you get an appraisal showing that your loan balance is less than 80% of your home’s current value.
>I ruled out option #2 because appraisals are expensive. Spending hundreds of dollars for an appraisal, on top of paying for PMI, felt like throwing good money after bad.
Your mileage may vary, but for myself, in August of 2023 in Raleigh, the property valuation cost was $190. Check with your lender, or shop around for a different valuation company that they accept. My numbers were similar to those of the author: my PMI was $113.83 and my time for loan-to-value to reach 80% was about four years.
What I found was doing the property valuation and then investing the lump sum of cash put me ahead of the 10% 1-year return. The author can now take their $115 monthly savings and invest, but it will never yield nearly as much as investing the $32,000 in even the most conservative scenarios.
Yeah, I don't get it. Even if the appraisal cost $500 that represents 4-5 months of extra pmi payments. It's not clear from the article, but it sounds like the author might not have had the 32k sitting around liquid, so they probably ended up paying for these months anyway. If they took the 32k out of the market that's even worse. I can't imagine choosing option one over option two unless you're unsure if your house has gained enough value or appraisals cost many thousands of dollars. But then I can't imagine getting a house loan with pmi in the first place. This is why everyone says to put 20% down.
Im not saying it is impossible, so I dont see that as some sort of gotcha.
From Wikipedia:
>Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin that describes the condition of a society that is producing too many potential elite members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status.
Im focusing on the USA, where engineers, STEM, and the like have high social standing, and do relatively well economically. Your "scholarship on the subject" is from 2007 and is from before the term elite overproduction was even coined.
You hadn't mentioned that your focus was on the USA, but rather a general "The targets of the theory are essentially people with non-stem post-secondary degrees" which is why I provided a paper that directly contradicts your statement. Elite Overproduction is not a US-specific topic, and the paper being from 2007 does nothing to invalidate its findings or lessen its relevance to Elite Overproduction.
Funnily enough, I hadn't checked astrange's reference that prompted this discussion, which is Gambetta and Hertog.
Engineers are technicians/craftspeople, not elites. They are compensated well much of the time, and respected, which means that many of them have more opportunities to become elites, especially when considering the intelligence that engineering degrees tend to filter/correlate with.
You're likely correct about the labor per kilogram-kilometer cost, and this e-bike solution is only competitive due to constraints applied by the government. This does ignore the negative externalities that result from the use of larger parcel delivery vehicles.
>a fleet of electric cargo bikes in Norwich to deliver thousands of packages per week.
Reading the article, this quote in particular stuck out to me because it is not uncommon for a single package car driver to deliver thousands of packages a week. This comes from my experience as a UPS Package Car Driver in Raleigh, North Carolina, which has a population density comparable to that of Norwich.
To all those snidely commenting about trains or rail: Do you think that Japan, of all places, is not familiar with railways? The article states that this is for palletized or small-package loads. Give them some credit.
It's what people call a "gadgetbahn": something that does the job of a railway, but not using railway technology, thereby introducing a whole load of unproven tech. This looks great in the AI renders but then turns out to make it infeasible.
> Currently the world's longest conveyor belt is 61km
100km. The article you linked used miles.
That one transfers the load between different sections of its length. The longest conveyer that does not transfers the load is 31km at Boddington Bauxite Mine in Australia.
> This is five times longer [...]
Does that actually introduce any new technical difficulties?
Suppose I needed a 2m x 1m table. I could get some 2m long boards and put enough in parallel to get my 1m width. I could put 1m boards perpendicular to those underneath at the ends and nail the 2m long boards to them. Then add legs at the 4 corners and I have a table.
Then I need a 5m x 1m table. I could take the same approach except using 5m boards instead of 2m boards. I might need to nail some more perpendiculars in the middle part of the table or maybe add some legs in the middle.
As I need longer and longer tables that approach keeps working up to maybe 10m. I don't think my local source of boards has boards longer than that.
So if I need a 30m x 1m table I need a new approach. I need to figure out something that doesn't require single boards that span the whole thing. It has to be limited to boards I can reasonably get. Let's say I figure out how to make that 30m x 1m table using no boards longer than 4m.
At that point I expect that I'd be able to build tables of any greater length by just doing whatever I did in the middle of the 30m table but doing more of that.
I'd expect that a similar thing happens when you build a 100km long conveyor. The specific project was "build a 100km long conveyor" but to solve it you figure out the solution to "build an arbitrarily long conveyor" and then apply that to "build a 100km long conveyor".
It worked out in Paris for quite a while, granted it was smaller than pallet workloads but still, a large physical object transportation network (akin to pneumatic tubes) was quite useful. IIRC the downfall was flooding combined with degraded infrastructure due to lack of maintenance, but those are procedural and planning issues, not foundational issues that cannot be overcome.
Similar smaller-than-container transportation networks exist elsewhere, even temporary ones used for evacuating tunnels while they are being bored. Even coal strip-mining type of situations have extremely long length conveyor systems that work pretty well.
If you forget the nonsense AI picture for a moment, what they are doing is essentially not much more than extra-specialised rail, which when built for a specific purpose makes a lot of sense, especially when you want to factor in autonomy, or per-object routing instead of single-train based routing. It's already done in factories too.
I'm not arguing you can make something like this work. However it will cost a lot of $$$ and in the end you won't have anything better than known freight trains. Even if you convince every [geographical area the size of Japan] to install one, the scale factors still won't make this better or cheaper than a train.
But that's the thing, it has already been done, already been proven and it does work. Roads and classic freight rail are not the only thing that are used right now that do this.
