Most modern batteries like this are weatherproof and can be mounted outside the home. Most modern batteries use LiFePO4 chemistry, which while not perfect, is much less risky in terms of thermal runaway than older lithium ion batteries.
Living in Australia, and travelling to Europe last Christmas as a family of 4, I really wanted to get the direct London to Perth flight, but connecting flights didn't line up. Being able to do Melbourne or Sydney would be great. Not needing to deal with connections, and cutting 6+ hours off the total travel time sounds amazing, possibly getting us there a day earlier, meaning more time for Greggs vegan sausage rolls.
Also bad for fuel economy (and/or take a hit on cargo/pax/luggage carrying capacity): You have to take off with all that fuel even though you only need X / hr. Increased weight = more flying at a lower altitude (+ air resistance) until the fuel burn makes it safe to fly higher.
On shorter flights, you still have the weight impact from that empty tank and its infra. If they had to make a bump out on the fuselage, you have a permanent aerodynamics hit.
It's like permanently attaching a cargo carrier to your vehicle to carry more fuel. Fewer fuel stops, but more burn per mile. Can make sense in some situations.
The study of breaking up long-haul flights for reduced fuel burn is usually called: "Intermediate Stop Operations"
Not only do take-offs spend large amounts of fuel; the fact of a landing and the servicing and refueling in the airport also cost the airlines.
Not having to land but instead having to carry some extra fuel while the engines work in their most efficient mode, and the air drag is low at a high altitude, should make airlines money. Else they won't try that :)
It's basically the business model for some airlines like the Icelandic and middle eastern ones. Hub in the middle so you're not paying (potentially extra) staff to rest on an aircraft and/or hotels at each end. Be at home more rather than an out-station. Fuel up more where its cheaper. Do some "scissor" routing. Fly cheaper/less specialized aircraft. Not as easy for Qantas to get all those advantages. Cargo airlines do the same to carry more cargo.
It's okay that different businesses specialise differently. Icelandic Air can do the two short hops and Qantas can focus on the super long nonstop routes, they're both valid. When companies in an industry become carbon copies of each other, they race to the bottom and the industry rapidly enshittifies.
At some crossover point, the reduced fuel carrying (and max capacity requirement) makes up for the additional takeoff+landing. When we're talking ultra-long-haul, constantly fighting against more gravity due to incr fuel weight adds up to a lot of cost/burn.
A compromise option is a technical stop[0] where the plane lands to refuel but passengers don't have to transfer to another aircraft (and often don't even have to deplane). I've never experienced one of these but it sounds way less annoying/stress-inducing than a connecting flight.
But it may allow operation of more routes without the need to refuel at both ends. That can be logistically interesting, paticularly going forward in a world of fuel crisis and uncertainty. Being able to deliver people in and out of Cuba without having to refuel in that country would be a market niche.
Assuming you can regularly land with your fuel tanks half-full. You could overbuild everything to support that, but usually airlines don't want to pay for a niche design to support that. I'd bet military aircraft do get that treatment though.
It is actually rather common. Many airlines running shorter flights will not refuel at every stop. It saves time on the ground, which can be more valuable then fuel.
22 hours is a very long time to be in a plane. But, being able to skip a stop in a 3rd nation is likely worthwhile for many. Depending on the routes, it will likely reduce the overall travel time significantly and a meaningful amount of time in the air.
I'd love to visit Australia and SE Asia but am hesitant with those long flights. I'd probably be fine with layflat seats but those are well beyond what I'd ever consider paying for an airline ticket.
Many of colleagues do this all the time, usually via the Middle East. I did it before; it sucks but with enough gin tonic and melatonin it goes by in with too much pain.
You just know this is going to be 2-3 times the price of an economy seat, which means you're going to buy the economy seat anyway. In flights, price beats everything else.
I think this is an ancillary specifically for economy class passengers—you pay a certain amount to reserve a 4-hour slot on a bunk or something. I have no idea, but my guess is economy + nap slot would still come in well under the cost of a business seat. Plus they can sell those same 6 berths what, 4 or 5 times over in the same 22-hour flight?
If I recall correctly they’re not certified for use during taxi takeoff and landing, I’d imagine due to orderly-evacuation kinds of requirements.
You could pack a lot more in if you sedate them and put them in racks like they have at the morgue. TBH I'd sign up for that on a long flight if the sedative recovery wasn't bad.
I've traveled UK to Australia a few times. Not nonstop, but with stops in SE Asia, basically 2x13 hours plus a few hours airport time.
It sucks, but you get over it because how else are you going to get there? If you don't suffer blood clots or something, it isn't really actively dangerous.
The longest I've spent in a dentist's chair is perhaps an hour, when I had braces as a teen.
Being cooped up in a metal tube for 13 hours, knowing you had to do the same thing tomorrow, and then the same thing two more fucking times on your way home, is not worth any vacation to me.
Then don't do it for vacation. A resort in Australia is no more valuable to you than one in Florida (if you're in the US). Do it for something more meaningful.
Seattle to Joburg is brutal. It's ~23 hours of flying with a lay over somewhere like Dubai. As much as a 23 hour flight sounds terrible, it's hard for me to express how much dread I felt getting back onto a plane right after a 13 hour flight. I'd rather just hunker down for the full day I think.
What are the economics of connecting flights? I'd imagine that max flight time isn't the only factor; hubs allow people to move around via connecting flights in a way that might not be economically acceptable if all flights were direct.
These ultralong flights will surely only be used regularly on routes with enough traffic, like London/Sydney.
Although they could also run intermittently to different places. Like London/Sydney on Monday, London/Melbourne on Tuesday... Which one brings in more money? I really have no idea. If you do it like this you can serve more people with direct flights, but they can't pick any day they want. I was once on a scenic long-distance train for some reason that didn't run every day due to low usage — Wellington to Auckland, I think? Normally you'd fly.
New A350's has better air quality, higher humidity and cabin pressure, and these long haul flits have less seats to reduce weight .. but it's still brutal.
It is indeed wild that the easiest way to do large-scale logging in those days was to slap together some tracks and roadbed and run trains up the valley. And then tear it all down again when it was time to move to the next one.
The railway is the historical norm, roads as we know them needed rubber tyres to really 'get traction'. This was a late innovation compared to rail.
Rails for high speed with safety, ride comfort and advanced signalling to maintain a scheduled service is a very different proposition to some temporary rails to get to the front line of a war, a new coal seam or forest 'port'. The latter is much easier compared to a road but now we have big machines for the latter, not the former.
That's based on the manufacturer's "lets not upset our dealers" maintenance schedule and is completely unnecessary. In reality you can probably bring your EV to the dealer once every 4 years or so. On that schedule you should:
- check the brake fluid for water
- change the cabin air filter
- change the gearbox oil
- check/change the battery coolant
If you're going in more frequent than that you're getting a very expensive windshield wiper replacement.
The real kicker is going to be repair costs. An EV has about 10% of the moving parts of an ICE car, so in theory repairs should be much less frequent. But if the ICE is a Toyota and the EV is a Tesla, YMMV.
You'll probably have to replace the battery at around 250,000 miles but at that point the car is worth pretty much scrap value anyways.
FWIW, my 10+ year spreadsheet of the maintenance costs on my last ICE lined up pretty well with that - about 1/3 of the costs were ICE-specific issues, 2/3 were for parts that would have been common to an EV.
> In reality you can probably bring your EV to the dealer once every 4 years or so.
Not really, I need twice-yearly seasonal tire changes/rotations.
How much of that 2/3 was brakes? In 100,000 miles on our ICE we replaced brakes twice and they likely need replacing soon again. On our EV at 100,000 miles they look like they'll last another 100,000.
Brakes were ~8.5% of the total, or ~17% of the 2/3. Some combination of being light on brake use (manual + efficient driving) and the road salt used here means I replaced the brakes from corrosion before they wore down from use.
I could budget for yearly service (rather than the never-service-until-required plan I went with) that would presumably lengthen the lives of my brakes as far as corrosion is concerned, but at current shop rates that would cost more than what my brake replacements cost.
>Not really, I need twice-yearly seasonal tire changes/rotations.
Are you somewhere where you actually need dedicated winter tires or have you just convinced yourself that rocking all weathers all year isn't feasible?
That feels like a bit of a trick question - as big as I am on dedicated winter tires, I think a lot of people are sleeping on modern all weathers.
So, living in Alberta, and spending significant time in the AB/BC rockies in the winter, I still think all weathers would be feasible, but I'm more comfortable with dedicated winters. (For that matter, when I'm buying winters, I'm always borderline on whether I should get studded or not.) (And as a parallel effect, with dedicated winters I can also run higher performance all-season tires during the summer.)
And if I ran all-weathers with my driving patterns, I'd still want to be rotating them yearly, so that would cut my dealer visits by half, but definitely not to once every 4 years.
And tying back to my last ICE vehicle - for the first 4 years of its life it would have been okay without a dealer visit if you took tires/oil changes out of the equation, but not for any 4-year period after that. There are just too many random little things that break down in cars over time. (e.g. after 12 years or so the cruise control buttons were getting really mushy - I replaced them myself for the cost of the $65 part, but YMMV on whether you feel a service visit is warranted when removing your steering wheel air bag.)
Op is in a salt state (road salt, snowy winters). Dedicated snow tires are much better than all seasons to the degree I will take a 2wd Civic (with lsd) on snow tires over 4wd 4Runner on all seasons.
Also rotating tires every 10-20k miles is good because most cars run higher camber in the rear (inner shoulder wear) than front and the fronts wear the outside shoulder more because of turning. Swapping them extends tire life by spreading the wear.
Newer generation SKUs (which that one is) are often in short supply. I have plenty of bad things to say about Azure, but I've never had trouble getting capacity older than bleeding edge in eastus2 and centralus regions, at least.
You'd have to be spectacularly stupid to bet on these kinds of things without having insider knowledge, because you ought to know good and damn well by now that the people with insider knowledge are DEFINITELY betting on them.
Even if you are not "betting" similar trades are happening in the stock market as well. Large movements in oil futures shortly before policy changes are announced.
Insider trading is at least regulated in the stock market, albeit imperfectly. Imagine how much worse it would be if C-levels could just short their own stock during a board meeting. No one without insider knowledge would touch it.
Matt Levine often says something like "insider trading is not about fairness, it's about theft." The problem isn't that it's less fair to some stock traders than others, and that stock trading should be some form of perfect gambling where everyone has an equal chance of success. Stock trading is inherently about exploiting information asymmetries — that is what all "non-insiders" are trying to do. But insider trading is wrong because it's effectively stealing confidential information from the company & shareholders, which is in violation of & conflict with the fiduciary responsibility that board members, executives, and employees generally have towards shareholders.
Conceptually, I think that is the right analogy to think about. Prediction markets "want" to be a more accurate source of information, just like stock markets, so from that lens "getting" information to be more accurate is good. When government officials are placing bets on prediction markets, though, it's a massive violation of operational security, and leaking confidential information. They probably think that they are acting anonymously, but it creates so many opportunities for unfriendly state actors to get information, especially if people do it consistently.
Yes, 100%, it is information asymmetry. It happens in every "market" in the world.
The goal should be to balance the information asymmetry, not burry it.
Government officials using their power to affect war decisions ought to be a crime on it's own, not surfacing the information to the public through a prediction market.
This was my thought. If these markets continue allowing insiders, it’ll drive all of the cash from regular people away. So there will be way less money for insiders to win even if they are allowed.
So the perception of insiders is pretty bad for prediction markets as a business imo.
The sooner they knock off the rhetoric about the “theory” behind prediction markets and start thinking about it like a business, the sooner they will take insiders seriously.
I think the market could adapt if regular people left. Insider trading would become multilayered and complex. Insiders would scheme against lower-level insiders; decisionmakers would try to trick insiders into thinking that one thing will happen before doing the complete opposite thing. The world would become more erratic and unpredictable, even insiders wouldn't know what is going on.
Although Polymarket is currently spending a lot of money trying to market itself to working-class regular people to get hooked and scam their paychecks out of[0]
The problem is that the number of people who have any sort of “insider” (material non public) info at all is orders of magnitude lower than the number of people who are well-versed in material public info. And not all insiders are going to place bets.
Kalshi and poly market are going after mass market appeal which is why they buy Super Bowl ads.
Let's say that you know that event Y is going to be announced that will make event X more likely. Before Y is announced you buy shares in X on a prediction market or buy some asset that has price correlated with X. After the announcement you liquidate your position and pocket the difference.
Whether X actually happens or not is irrelevant to you. All that's relevant is the timing of the announcement of Y and the directional effect of Y on X.
A bet against an event is win/win if you want that event to occur. If you are a country that wanted the US to strike Iran, placing a large number of bets that they won't either gets you what you want or earns you money. It is one reason why you can't bet on someone being murdered, as it creates a deniable market to crowd source assassination. Strange that you can crowd source war, but not assassination.
Same goes for sport betting and yet here we are.
People like to bet. They willingly bet on things they have guaranteed disadvantage on (casino games like roulette, slots etc.).
People also drink pure poison (alcohol), smoke pure poison (cigarettes) and engage in brain dead activities like speeding and street racing.
Gambling should be judged as any other vice - people get something out of it (rush, hope, whatever) not by rational money allocation standards.
considering the scale involved, and the OSINT trend, is it possible that people could monitor and correlate stuff like airplane, or us navy activity to deduce when to enter ?
I saw a tweet about a trader placing an oil bet when they saw two military aircraft turn around on their way to Iran, via transponder. I believe before the deal was announced.
Traders have been using satellite images from around the world for DECADES, it seems more likely to be true than a conspiracy from a insider who actually makes the decision or has first line access to it.
in fact US army publicly admitting running a disinformation campaign involving flying planes knowing they would be seen by osint in the previous Iran attack from last summer
Do you buy oil or products made with it? Then sorry, you made a bet, and in fact you were just ripped off by your own government for the third time in a row.
Prediction markets are supposed to be providing the most accurate predictions.
The most accurate predictions come from insider information.
Poeple complaining about insider trading on prediction markets seem to be missing the point. They're supposed to have insider trading. That's the whole idea.
Why don't those reasons translate to prediction markets?
As I see it, insider trading leads to insiders making decisions purely to game the (prediction) markets which means that markets become more erratic and will surely lead to less money being available for companies to grow as investors realise that they are being robbed.
But there is still the problem of knowing which new trades the insiders made before the bet is settled (maybe solved by being an insider of the prediction market), and also since prediction markets need money on both sides (you are betting against other people, not the 'house') when the insiders make their buy they probably eat up most of or all of the action on the other side.
You can trade on non-public information if you obtain that information unintentionally. Now you have to be able to prove it’s unintentional if the question came up. A real experience example of this is if you work in an office building and your neighboring company, a public company, is being raided by the FBI. Can you use that information to take a position in the market? Yes, according to multiple attorneys we spoke with.
I bring this up because we assume the trading is coming from insiders but I wonder if the parties behind this have baked in a layer similar to my story above.
To close this back to your comment, and I don’t have an answer here: is knowing who the insiders are and acting on that a crime? If you did know and didn’t report them, are you breaking a law? Or worse, you reported it to the deaf ears of a regulator that are focused elsewhere or are under resourced to respond now?
it's legal to follow FBI cars and see who they raid so as to make trades. you could even have a hedge fund specialized on this. it's called alternative data
you can even be a regular employer of a public company and trade based on information sent on internal emails.
the only thing illegal is to be a designated insider - typically a restricted group of people with access to sensitive information
This interpretation is incredibly unlikely. The first and third paragraphs discuss legality, but the middle one was merely talking about likelihood of prosecution?
Even then it would be inaccurate: the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
To be clear, I was responding about trading on internal communications, not specifically a raid. The practice of using internal communication to guide trading runs contrary to most company policies. I happen to have worked at a company where this kind of practice was both acknowledged and openly discussed. It was a strange place.
> the regulators are not too stupid to put two and two together that you work for a company and got incredibly lucky with your trade
You’re implying some specific combination of factors, but it’s not clear what you mean. What qualifies as "timing"? Around earnings, when trading volume is highest or just around some event? And what exactly counts as "lucky"?
Why would regulators scrutinize a sub-$25k purchase of my own company’s stock? That concern feels overstated. Granted, I’m not a lawyer. In practice I can place a trade at any time. If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny.
The claim that you "absolutely cannot do this" is simply incorrect. I stand by that.
> If someone is routinely making $20k–$30k transactions, that alone is unlikely to trigger scrutiny
If they never make money, you’re fine. If they make a lot of money, it will get flagged ex post facto. Regulators then check if you or your family have any affiliations with the issuer; if they do, it’s flagged further. All of this typically happens automatically after companies’ stock prices move significantly.
Are you implying that there is arbitrage between the prediction market and the real market? Until now we were assuming that the prediction market is self-contained, with its other side staying within the confines of the prediction market.
insiders would presumably be bigger trades that show high conviction about improbable events. An insider would wait until the last minute to take advantage of low prices of a market close to expiration.
Apparently, according to you, lots of people are spectularly stupid because the only way you make money in a prediction market is for someone to bet on the opposing view point.
This is the story of Microsoft - five different ways to do the thing, none of which do everything, and all of which are in various states of disrepair ranging from outright deprecation on up through feature-incomplete preview. Which one do you use? Who knows, but by the time you get everything moved over to that one and make allowances for all the stuff the one you chose doesn't support, there will be a new more logical choice for "that one" and you'll have to start over again. Wheee.
We are now definitely doing a lot of that. My manager has been saying things like, "I don't even know how it works, but I used AI to build [thing], and I just sent it to a PR." He's very strong technically, but the mindset has absolutely shifted to, "move fast and break things, yoloooooo". It's frustrating to say the least.
I don't mean this as a jab, but would you use Windows to develop software? Especially Windows that has AD teeth sunk into it where everything is "managed by your organization." It's just a thousand small cuts for seemingly no good reason.
I'm a c++ developer and I wouldn't use anything other than Windows to develop software, for one reason alone - Visual Studio is a fantastic tool that is better than any IDE I have ever tried it and imho it's the best product Microsoft makes. It just works and works well. And most console toolchains are only on Windows, so outside of iOS development I don't really have a choice.
No, but I also wouldn't let people who do not understand the soul of the OS to rewrite it.
If I were the microslop god for 6 weeks, I would force everyone to go to a boot camp and use Windows 7 for 4 of those weeks so they could see what made it so good.
No invasiveness, an OS that felt like yours. Just enough eye candy to not be distracting but to also feel like a clean modern system. Low system usage at idle. Calm, clean, and ready to roll when you clicked a button.
Windows is NEVER going to be MacOS, but the dev teams seem obsessed with macifying windows while also wedging that AI abomination copilot into every line of code, so windows is getting a tag team of rapid enshittification on top of already having been massively enshittified, and at least some portion of it is due to the people being paid to make it not understanding what it is supposed to be, the niche it held, and the reason for windows existence.
Yes, because you know what all of the 200,000+ employees are doing in every wing and branch of the entire company.
Then again, Microsoft themselves directly dispute your statement:
Across the landscape of more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft, we support Windows, Android, iOS, and macOS devices. Windows devices account for approximately 60 percent of the total employee-device population, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Our employees are empowered to access Microsoft data and tools using managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.
Not to mention that most app designers use OSX for the design tools, which means that there is going to be by default some bleed between the two systems on design choices alone.
> while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45 percent are
Pretty much everyone has an android or iOS device in their pocket. A lot of those devices are enrolled into Microsoft MDM in order to access email/teams/etc. These phones are part of the stats. Dev work in general is done on Windows boxes, unless you are in specific teams that have other requirements. Default is Windows, specifically Windows laptop.
Worst case somewhere around 50,000-150,000 tablets.
That leaves ~200,000 unaccounted for devices with only macOS on the table. I think the saturation is higher than you have experienced, although I'll give that it's entirely possible that the areas you worked in were not one of them.
