> “Why did so many CenterPoint power lines and poles snap so easily? Why wasn’t the grid built stronger, and why wasn’t vegetation cut away?”
Why not put power lines under ground, like other countries do? It's probably more expensive, but large scale repairs or rebuilds several times a year do not sound cheap either.
More expensive is an understatement, I think it costs like 10x more to put them underground. It's also very difficult and disruptive in dense areas where there's all sorts of pipes and cables already there.
That doesn't mean it's a bad idea, and some of their network is already underground, but the reason it isn't universal is that it genuinely is very hard to do.
Well, still less expensive than power outage i.e. economy outage. Losses must be enormous, logically you should be happy to pay 10x for underground cables.
Logically, yes. But that's seldom how things go. Burying the wires would be a major capital expenditure. Bonds need to be issued, depending on the municipality, voters may need to get involved. Shareholders, where applicable, don't like it.
Yes, the cost for repair is high, but that's part of the operating budget, and each instance of repair is much cheaper than the cable-burying project, so the cost is "amortized" in a weird way that seems more palatable.
Meanwhile, the utility isn't held responsible for the economic costs related to the outage, so they don't care about those costs. Even in California, where the utility has been found liable when their infrastructure starts wildfires that kill people, they still aren't doing massive cable-burying projects.
I don't agree with it. I think it's stupid and short-sighted. But there are reasons. Most of them start with "c" and end with "apitalism".
Houston is doing this for new developments but it’s infeasible for existing neighborhoods because there’s already a bunch of other stuff underground there and its a very slow and expensive process.
The correct way to handle above-ground powerlines is to perform regular maintenance on any trees growing near the lines. Centerpoint skimped on this expense and it resulted in 85% of Houston losing power.
I think is a huge part of it. I saw a Houston area news channel interviewing locals and some said that they had requested clearing from Center Point energy on the property months/years before anything would ever get trimmed. Austin linemen who agreed to travel down there said they were told to pay for their own meals and hotels (aka no per diem available) when they didn’t -have- to go there and were trying to help sent by Austin Energy. Who is going to volunteer to go under those terms?
I'm in South Texas (not Houston though) and same - I had trees growing into the power lines in my alley. I put in a request to trim them and was basically told nicely to pound sand (I think they said something like they might get around to it in six to twelve months). I ended up paying a trimmer to take care of it, but I don't imagine that everyone in my (lower-income) neighborhood can afford that.
I mean tbf the linemen are making like $120/hr (double pay) so its probably still worth coming here. But it’s not a good look for Centerpoint and shows what they’re focused on.
Modern installation of buried utilities in urban areas is often done with horizontal boring these days. Minimal damage to roads and other infrastructure that way.
Not in Finland. Each housing complex is a separate company, and when you buy an apartment you actually buy a share in the company. Until sold to the buyers, the housing company is usually owned by the construction company. Banks of course provide funding, but the construction company is the one left holding the bag if the apartments don't sell.
This is all interesting, but misses the point: the bridge collapsed due to a social (management, responsibilities, organization, ...) failure. Investigating the engineering story distracts from that, both in the video and apparently effectively as there is a NTSB investigation and not mentioning if any organizational review if the same rigor.
He talks about this a bit in the final three paragraphs, that the people writing the work orders are already overwhelmed by the amount of paperwork they need to deal with, preventing them from paying enough attention to what these reports are actually saying, and these new recommendations will have the primary effect of increasing that burden.
(haven't yet read the full report) If NTSB in non-aviation areas works the same way as in aviation areas, that's definitely covered by the investigation.
That's why ridiculously common case summarized as "pilot error" usually involves several components including organization, training, etc.
EDIT (After reading the report): And indeed, "what we found" section and "what we recommend" is all about how PennDOT and related orgs operate.
Grady does not miss the point, but repeatedly says he does not understand the social part. This calls for someone else with better expertise to do that kind of analysis.
I really hope that the price increase creates a business opportunity for new technology. This space has been plagued by subpar "free" alternatives (Openstack, Kubernetes) for a decade.
Do you mean landing with a tailwind? A headwind should allow the plane to create the same amount of lift it needs to avoid stalling at lower ground speeds.
Yes, that’s correct, but the headwind stops being so headwind-y near the ground, so your plane needs to go a bit faster to compensate for the loss of headwind-ness in the seconds before touchdown.
On the flip side you also get ground-effect when you are low to the ground where the high-pressure underneath the wing gets trapped against the ground creating a cushion of pressure increasing lift.
The Quobyte DCFS does end-to-end CRC32 for each 4k block of data. All metadata and communication is also CRC protected, although one other frame boundaries.
They developed MSFS 2020, which is the killer app for VR headsets, and announced a successor already. At least there seems to be some strategic misalignment.
This seems to imply that the LHC has done it's job? Would it be switched off in the foreseeable future? Does the CERN run other instruments or is its existence tied to the LHC?
CERN has been around since 1954. Among other incredible nuclear science earning several Nobel prizes it also employed Tim Berners Lee when he created what would become the www.
The LHC is but one of CERN’s world changing contributions.
This is the wrong place to make an unhelpful comment like this one; Consider reading the HN guidelines on comment quality again, and then maybe share the part of GP's comment you think needs clarifying.
What am I wrong about? Everything factual I said is backed up here[1]. You can disagree with my opinion that the science is great, but it’s arguably impossible to be wrong on a purely subjective opinion.
As you said: this is the wrong place to get something like this wrong.
This is the long term schedule for LHC [1] where you can get an idea about the plans for runs, maintainace and upgrades. The current plan is to run with HL-LHC (High Luminosity LHC) starting from Run 4 (2030) until Run 6 (2041). These plans will probably be extended because of different factors, but this gives the overall plan for LHC. And also why we start thinking about the next collider because it will take decades to be designed, build, commissioned and tested. This will require huge amount of efforts, community built and collaboration on a global scale.
Indeed. A working group suggested the specs for what would become LHC back in 1987, and R&D for the magnets had started the year before. So 21 years before they first fired up the LHC in 2008.
Keep in mind that the LHC would the existing tunnels from LEP, this new one will require a lot of drilling, so planning would have to start earlier relative to startup I imagine.
Not quite. We’re currently preparing for phase 2 of the LHC with increased beam intensities and therefore increased collected date.
From a computing point of view, this poses lots of fun challenges!
The current plan I believe is to run LHC and the experiments until the end of the 30s, to maximize return on investment in terms of “data per CHF”.
Aside from that, CERN has other experiments and projects, some are benefitting from LHC and the big experiments, some are connected to the chain of preaccellerators, and some are completely independent.
Yes, the LHC has done its job, more or less. Of course there is more utility to be squeezed out of it. But it is also time to consider the next generation.
At Quobyte, we are working on the Data Center File System (DCFS), a highly scalable and fault-tolerant software storage system built around a parallel file system core. Customers use Quobyte DCFS for ML and HPC clusters in industry and academia, k8s and OpenStack infrastructures, streaming, web mail, post production, origin and CGI clusters, and as a scalable backend for SaaS products. There are Quobyte DCFS clusters which span thousands of machines and crunch 100s of GB/s!
Under the hood, DCFS is a full-stack storage system, written in Java and C++. The engineering work covers everything from kernel development over our own replicated database system design to distributed algorithms (Paxos!) and performance. In short: lots of real-world challenging and fun problems! We work as a highly efficient engineering team, and do mandatory code reviews, lots of unit and integration testing,
https://huggingface.co/spaces/akhaliq/depth-pro
For some pictures it outputs something reasonable, for others it's completely broken (black with colored noise in one area).
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