Not all states require a safety or emissions inspection. Thus, one could discover if there is any correlation between safety inspections and road accidents. One could also examine if comparable municipalities have better or worse air quality in connection with inspections. This is a decidable question that need not rely on speculation.
Without doing any actual work on this, I predict that such investigations would reveal a weak or no significant correlation between inspections and the outcomes suggested in this comment. Someone less lazy and more motivated than I could do a literature search. For my part, the question falls below my threshold of significance.
On Tuesday, both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported the pier will fully cease operations in July, well ahead of initial predictions. The Pentagon refused to comment on these reports.
“Our basic position has always been that we welcome any and all efforts to bring in additional aid to Gaza given the crucial need for aid,” a UN spokesperson said on Wednesday. “But at the same time, we have made very clear the limitations of getting aid through these avenues.”
UN aid agencies were also not able to pick up any aid delivered through Kerem Shalom on Wednesday due to unrest in the area, the spokesperson said.
Kerem Shalom is just a drop off, the spokesperson said, and Israel has the responsibility to ensure the assistance reaches those who need it most and enables the environment to do so.
The spokesperson said the UN is working with its Israeli counterparts to make sure that “those additional responsibilities are dealt with.”
It’s also unclear how much food is getting into Rafah and other parts of Southern Gaza.
The US military estimates the pier will cost more than $200 million for the first 90 days and involve about 1,000 service members.
It is unclear how much longer it will be operational.
I heard the pier was going to be decommissioned and was searching for stories whether this was true or not. There was no indication in the top hits in the search about the pier being decommissioned.
The heading of this portion of the story doesn’t seem to match the story. It seems to me to be the exact opposite. Although not confirmed, the NYT and WSJ have reported it will cease operations.
The news story demonstrates lack of competency (titles not matching the story). The building of the pier demonstrates lack of competency (it doesn’t appear suitable for the conditions). The attempt to use the pier to provide aid demonstrates lack of competency (food cannot even be delivered when the pier is working).
I bet they do not cease operations until after the election. It may not deliver one pound of food between now and November, but we will continue to spend $200 million every 90 days to insure that another failure of our military and government doesn’t get talked about.
I lived in Texas in the early 70s. Back then the inspection sticker was $2 but they’d always find something minor that cost more to fix. Headlight aiming was popular
Our local Telco/ISP is using that money to rewire (with fiber, so technically not rewiring) their entire service area so some results. They’re getting some seriously big numbers per rural customer, 20K or more per drop. They plowed my drop in a few days ago with 2 pair but they have no idea when it will be lit up
How many homes that are currently not connected that cannot access Starlink? I got the AI summary so it may be flawed but it appeared that if you divide fund by connections the cost per connection is tens of thousands. If that is correct, it is simply unbelievable waste.
The FCC decision to yank SpaceX’ funding always looked arbitrary and capricious to this reader. Motivated by the sheer lobbying power of the fiber interests that see the opportunity to benefit from the government largesse.
Although fiber, particularly in sparse rural areas can be enormously expensive to install. Yes, fiber has significantly more bandwidth - orders of magnitude more bandwidth than LEO satellite. But it that worth tens of thousands of dollars per passing?
Here is an extreme example, which is an outlier - cost of passings in Western Alaska: up to $200,000 per household (source). And here is the money quote, no pun intended:
“the most significant cost driver is the difference between the relatively small number of homes being served and the distance to the nearest fiber optic network."
Watching the debate last week, I commented to someone that it was like a long series of “yo mama” jokes. Glad to learn I was not the only one.
I will leave two short videos with Richard Nixon reminiscing on LBJ and RFK, as a way to reflect on how much the quality of modern politicians has degraded.
We got fiber to the home in our rural farm under the Obama grifter cycle. I don’t have it at my main residence and I would like to know what exactly fiber provides that is important that SpaceX cannot provide. I see all kinds of YouTubers with RV or sail boating channels that upload their 30 minute videos. Hard for me to imagine that education requires more bandwidth.
The insurance premium on my home has jumped by 50% from last year!
Immediate call to my insurance agent, who explained that this is not the standard Biden-inflation. This is a reflection of the major losses insurance companies have had over the last few years due mainly to forest fires devastating inhabited areas. Changing insurance companies has now become rather problematic, since insurers are being much more selective about which properties they are prepared to insure.
Peeling back the layers of the onion, house insurance has become more expensive because of the failure of FedGov to implement sensible forest management policies. Forests have been turned into accidents waiting to happen because they have been allowed to become overgrown and dead trees are not removed – all in the name of “Green” foolishness.
An entrepreneur in my area proposed building a wood-fueled power station using dead trees and overgrowth from local forests. It was turned down because the power plant would produce CO2 – as if the inevitable forest fire would not also produce the same CO2 uselessly.
All of this bureaucratic posturing amounts to a hidden tax on the long-suffering population. But we put up with it. Our Bad!
There is mobility and there is bandwidth. RVers and sailors value mobility and would typically be willing to trade bandwidth for connectivity while mobile. Different use cases.
But the key question of rural coverage hinges on connectivity first, especially since traditional satellite based solutions like the service offered by HughesNet and ViaSat typically rely on much longer latency due to their use of geosynchronous satellites, compared to Starlink’s LEO constellation. On a geosynchronous connection, one way latency could be as high as 600ms, compared to 25-50ms on LEO.
High latency won’t only be noticeable for gaming, but would negatively affect other near real time communication such as videoconferencing. All of ViaSat’s current satellites are geostationary but the company announced plans to launch a LEO fleet of about 300 satellites. Compare with 5,000 LEO operational satellites in orbit today with Starlink.
Because the geosynchronous link budget is much more stringent, terminal equipment size and requirements are different from LEO. For instance, a Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) terminal for ViaSat may require a >1m stationary dish that is precisely aimed at the location of the satellite for best performance. In contrast, Starlink terminals are much smaller, and because the terminal can connect to multiple satellites that are visible at any given moment, its requirements in terms of positioning and support for mobile service are less strict.
Of course it’s unbelievable waste, it’s a government project. I ran the ISP network for that telco back in the dial-up days, the president at the time wouldn’t touch any money from the guvment because it always had way too many strings. I’m guessing the current president (must be about the family’s fourth generation) couldn’t resist the big bucks; I left there close to 25 years ago and don’t know for sure. They ran 2 pair down my quarter mile long driveway, which took less than half an hour, and spent more time than that getting the last few feet, with no damage, through my wife’s flower beds to the house. I’m thinking most of the money went for fiber along the road, vaults, directional boring, and the like. My driveway fiber wasn’t put in a sheath and I’m guessing well under half a US buck per foot. Couple hours work including marking the existing wiring and AC power lines, walking down the driveway with me to find the old steel pipe culvert (now sprayed orange), and cleanup. They managed to cut my existing DSL service so another half hour to find and fix that, not ready to light up the new fiber yet.
500 Mbs for USD50 a month to start, the same price I’m paying now for 15Mbs DSL with 15 or more year old tech. The couple Starlink customers I know here switched because it was cheaper, faster, and more reliable. The last I checked they had several Tbs of backbone bandwidth feeding whatever their customer base is these days, probably a few thousand at most (we had 18K dialup customers when I left through 4 T1s, multihomed to multiple providers). For the telco I suspect the big advantage was somebody else paying for all new infrastructure that replaced the copper they plowed in around 40 years ago, beside internet it’s also their landline service. We dropped the landline over the winter when we left for FL and with WiFi calling (cell service is spotty) decided to not turn it back on
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