I think the problem with your thought is that it really requires a "stars to align perfectly" kind of thing for that to actually be achieved, especially over the long-term.
Many people had that sort of experience in say....the 1950-2000. You had a lot of smaller new developments bulldozed into new areas, and for the first 20 years especially - almost everyone who moved in to those new homes, moved in at a similar time and with young children of a similar age.
In this way, those pockets of suburbia had a bunch of temporary features. You had a much higher quantity of local children within walking distance than would naturally be the case in the long-term for that number of mid-sized SFH homes, and you had a highly developed area with a highly undeveloped area nearby. (land not yet turned into subdivisions like your own).
But a few decades down the line, even without the large behavioral shifts in society - now you've got an endless sea of divided-up suburbia with no nearby wilderness accessible by children on foot/bike, and there's only 2 nearby kids of the same age range rather than 20.
Which is to say - I think it's very difficult to achieve that as as a stable long-term environment, at least with the typical US SFH subdivision density.
And once you get out to rural you run into the problem of the kids not being able to see each other without parental involvement.
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Anyway, I did grow up in a "goldlocks zone" environment like you describe. It was very nice, and I was particularly adventurous + had more relaxed than average parents.
But I actually found in (Upstate NY) college that the kids who had the most similar levels of life experience to me were the...NYC kids. The city enabled and outright required them to be much more independent than the more normal US suburb experience was. They'd be taking transit all over the city, many even just to get to school by middle/high school - and then after school they'd be going out with their friends to get snacks or hang out in the park or whatever.
In contrast, many of the "average" suburb peers had basically never been able to go a single place in their lives without an adult driving them until maybe they got a license at 16-17 and seemed very limited in their development for it.
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tl;dr - I think the idealized version of a suburb can be good for it, the average US suburb can't stay that way, but I also think major cities offer a lot of potential for them. Denser + walkable medium towns + nature outside them could also be good - but that's more of a EU than US development pattern.
As someone who's spent a while playing with one (that I didn't buy) and who hasn't picked it up off the shelf in months:
I don't think most users were returning it because they hated the UI or even the device in the usual sense. (There are certainly issues I could detail, but they don't feel like the core problem).
The core problem is just that it just doesn't really....accomplish anything.
Once you get past treating it like an expensive Google Cardboard ("neat tech demo") - it's very hard to figure out what the point of the thing is. What problem does this actually solve for you/what thing is it actually better to use this for than other existing solutions.
Extremely high price tag with no "killer app"/function that makes anyone who tries it "get it" quickly and want one, is a pretty impossible sell.
I don't think that comparison works very well at all.
We had plenty of options for better technologies both available and in planning, 56k modems were just the cost effective/lowest common denominator of their era.
It's not nearly as clear that we have some sort of proven, workable ideas for where to go beyond LLMs.
Loaves of fresh bread are generally in the bakery section of the grocery store. If you're looking for a loaf of bread (often unsliced) that was baked that morning, has a much shorter ingredients list that's often solely the basic traditional ones, doesn't necessarily have any sugar added, and will not keep for anywhere near as long, that's where it is. I'm not promising it'll live up to your standards, of course.
The bread aisle is pretty much for sliced sandwich bread (+ buns + similar things) that has preservatives to last for at least a week, and was usually not baked on site.
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I think the secondary point to note is that you're also just running into cultural differences: Americans don't really eat that much bread. And it's not a staple of meals besides 2 slices if you want a sandwich for lunch.
Hard data is shaky but most sources I can find put American per-capita bread consumption at a small fraction of the consumption of somewhere like France.
Having far fewer standalone bakeries and far less "good bread" is not so much that people are eating a bunch of worse bread instead - no one's serving sandwich bread with dinner, they're often just not eating that much bread at all.
Were you actually visiting what Americans would consider a grocery store?
I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.
Those stores are intended pretty much entirely for stuff people want while on the go, and the few "groceries" they stock are basically aimed at the kind of things a drunk/stoned person is craving at 3AM when nothing else is open (say, a frozen pizza), or the few things you might run out of by surprise in the morning/when about to eat and be willing to greatly overpay for being able to grab somewhere close by before your meal/schedule is ruined. (ex: milk, condiments, maybe eggs).
I do wonder if people are stopping into a CVS or Walgreens and thinking those are grocery stores. In a lot of the rest of the world, a small corner market like that would be a grocer, but in the US grocers are much larger stores.
> I'm not saying this is specifically the case for you, but it is remarkably common for visitors from other parts of the world to visit, go into what we consider a "convenience store", and then be confused that there's basically nothing in terms of actual groceries in there, with probably 80%+ of the "consumable" shelving devoted to snack/"junk" items.
But that is the problem isn't it? That you have to drive so far and look on a map to find a grocery store while in Europe you can just walk for 5 minutes and find one where you can buy fresh produce. So in Europe there are these convenient grocery stores that stocks fresh produce and so on, USA not having those is what we talked about.
So sure if you define "grocery store" as a store that sells fresh produce you are right, but then there are very few grocery stores in USA which is still the problem we talked about. It is so much easier and faster to get these wares in Europe than in USA.
That's basically getting into having radically different lifestyles and development patterns and you not liking a car-oriented one. (And hey, I agree with you and live somewhere I can walk to most things, including groceries. But that's not the average American lifestyle).
Approximately 92% of US households have at least one car, 59% of US households have more than one car.
The fundamental point that I am making is: Americans do not typically go to convenience stores to buy groceries, it's not even a consideration. The places most do go to buy their groceries do have fresh produce + meat and so on. They tend to just make less frequent trips and buy more at once.
Since they are getting there by car, it's also easier to buy a lot more at once.
When they get home - they also have a much larger refrigerator + freezer (possibly more than one) than is typically seen in Europe to store it in.
(To preface: I am strongly in favor of renewable energy overall).
To the extent that there is anything real to their dislike:
Poorly structured/overly generous homeowner net metering initiatives, especially for solar without storage, legitimately have escalated costs for everyone else in some regions.
The excessive subsidy given to those homeowners for power that's often not very valuable (as it comes primarily at a time of day that's already well supplied) comes from somewhere, and somewhere is....the pockets of everyone who doesn't have home rooftop solar.
And those people are typically poorer people in rented, denser housing than the average homeowner.
Most places have been moving to correct this mistake for the future (ex: CA's "Net Metering 3.0"), but that also gets pushback from people who wanted to take advantage of that unsustainable deal from the government or who incorrectly think it's a part of general anti-renewable pushes.
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Aside from that, in regions known for production of coal/oil/gas or major processing of, it's seen as a potential threat to jobs + mineral tax revenues that are often what underwrite most of their local/state government functions.
While there are plenty of job creation claims for renewables, it doesn't take a genius to see that they don't appear to need all that many workers once built, and that the manufacturing chain for the solar panels or wind turbines is probably not to be put in places like West Virginia, Midland TX, Alaska, etc.
My comment doesn't imply that at all. We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments).
We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
Early net metering schemes were often basically 1:1. You supply a kWh mid-day where it's not worth much and that's "equal" in value to you drawing a kWh at 18:30, even though the market price of electricity then might be 10x what it was when you earned your "credit" and the grid is far more strained.
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Most regions that already have a decent amount of behind the meter home solar at this point exhibit a strong "duck curve" effect, at least on sunnier days. Mid-day demand is deeply suppressed while solar output is strongest.
Meanwhile, the AM/PM peaks remain and are at times of the day when solar output is very low.
With more storage - solar can help cover those peaks (+ overnight demand). Without, you're not accomplishing all that much by just depressing mid-day loads even further unless you can restructure society to better match it's energy demands to those solar supply curves.
> We absolutely need more solar, and a lot of it. Just that we don't necessarily need more of it everywhere without making accompanying storage investments. (+ possibly transmission investments).
Maybe not literally everywhere, but almost everywhere would continue to benefit from more solar even if it's lacking storage. Despite the duck curve.
> We shouldn't be overpaying in generous subsidies to homeowners for power mid-day where it's now worth the least.
It's a bad way to do a renewable subsidy, but we do want some kind of subsidy and flawed is usually better than nothing. I'd prefer replacing the subsidies with a carbox tax but that is not going to happen.
Per the FlightRadar24 logs, it looks like only about 45min was wasted over Prestwick, not 2hrs. First approach was around 18:06, and they're breaking off to head for Edinburgh by about 18:51.
If there's considered to be a mistake here though, I'm guessing it's going to be spending too long before committing to the initial diversion.
Without knowing the weather they were seeing at the time, seems hard to say if they should have gone for a closer 2nd alternate than Manchester.
I don't think we know yet when min fuel was declared. At that point, they will be resequenced. Then we need to know when mayday fuel was declared. It sounds pretty odd, like perhaps there were multiple simultaneous situations and the crew did not have adequate information.
I don't think most people consider easy hot-swaps + front panel status lights particularly key features in their home NAS.
I don't swap drives unless something is failing or I'm upgrading - both of which are a once every few years or longer thing, and 15min of planned downtime to swap doesn't really matter for most Home or even SMB usage.
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As for the rest, TrueNAS gets me ZFS, a decent GUI for the basics, the ability to add in most other things I'd want to do with it without a ton of hassle, and will generally run on whatever I've got lying around for PC hardware from the past 5-10 years.
It's hard to directly compare non-identical products.
For me and my personal basic usage - yes, it really was pretty much as easy as a Synology to set up.
It's entirely possible that whatever you want to do with it is a lot of work on something like TrueNAS vs easy on a Synology, I'm not going to say that's the case for everything.
Hot swap for drives is a must on a NAS. If you have to power it down to swap out a drive there is a chance that your small problem becomes a larger one. Better to replace the drive immediately and have the NAS do the rebuild without a powercycle.
If you're worried the hard drives won't spin back up, I'd say you should instead spin them down regularly so you know that risk is basically zero. If you're worried the power supply will explode and surge into the drives when you turn it on, you should not be using that power supply at all. Any other risks to powering it down?
And for the particular issue of replacing a failed drive and not wanting to open up the case while it's powered, you can get a single drive USB enclosure to "hot swap" for $20. And if you use hard drives you should already have one of those laying around, imo.
Agree, you should consider replacing your drives on your primary server (backup servers we can debate) as soon as you start seeing the first SMART problems, like bad sectors. If you do regular data scrubbing, and none of these problems show up on the other drives, I'd argue the risk that they fail simultaneously is fairly low.
Hot swap drives are necessary on data centers where you don't want to have to pull the whole server and open the top cover just to replace a disk.
But on a home NAS? What problem would having to power it down and power it on for drive replacement create? You're going to resync the array anyways.
I don't mind them and I do use them but I consider them a very small QOL improvement. I don't really replace my disks all that often. And now that you can get 30TB enterprise samsung SSDs for 2k, two of those babies in raid 1 + an optane cache gives you extremely fast and reliable storage in a very small footprint.
No, I've seen this happen on larger arrays. The restart with a degraded array risks another drive not coming up and then you are on very thin ice. Powercycles are usually benign but they don't have to be and on an array there is a fair chance that all of the drives are equally old and if one dies there may be another that is marginal but still working. Statistically unlikely but I have actually seen this in practice so I'm a bit wary of it. The larger the array the bigger the chance. This + the risk of controller failure is why my backup box is using software RAID 6. It definitely isn't the fastest but it has the lowest chance of ever losing the whole thing. I've seen a hardware raid controller fail as well and that was a real problem. For one it was next to impossible to find a replacement and for another when the replacement finally arrived it would not recognize the drives.
In fact I find the synology disk trays to be very fragile. Out of the 48 trays I have, I think a good 6 or 7 do not close anymore unless you lock them with a key. A common problem apparently.
Not a lawyer but the de facto law has always appeared to only care about uploading.
Torrenting gets you in trouble because uploading at least a little bit is inherent to how it (and some other P2P) is supposed to work, and that's enough for a case.
Cases against people just downloading have always appeared to be very rare/non-existent, at least from when I used to follow the news on this stuff more. I don't think I've ever seen a case of someone threatened for solely downloading off direct download services, for example.
Many people had that sort of experience in say....the 1950-2000. You had a lot of smaller new developments bulldozed into new areas, and for the first 20 years especially - almost everyone who moved in to those new homes, moved in at a similar time and with young children of a similar age.
In this way, those pockets of suburbia had a bunch of temporary features. You had a much higher quantity of local children within walking distance than would naturally be the case in the long-term for that number of mid-sized SFH homes, and you had a highly developed area with a highly undeveloped area nearby. (land not yet turned into subdivisions like your own).
But a few decades down the line, even without the large behavioral shifts in society - now you've got an endless sea of divided-up suburbia with no nearby wilderness accessible by children on foot/bike, and there's only 2 nearby kids of the same age range rather than 20.
Which is to say - I think it's very difficult to achieve that as as a stable long-term environment, at least with the typical US SFH subdivision density.
And once you get out to rural you run into the problem of the kids not being able to see each other without parental involvement.
-------
Anyway, I did grow up in a "goldlocks zone" environment like you describe. It was very nice, and I was particularly adventurous + had more relaxed than average parents.
But I actually found in (Upstate NY) college that the kids who had the most similar levels of life experience to me were the...NYC kids. The city enabled and outright required them to be much more independent than the more normal US suburb experience was. They'd be taking transit all over the city, many even just to get to school by middle/high school - and then after school they'd be going out with their friends to get snacks or hang out in the park or whatever.
In contrast, many of the "average" suburb peers had basically never been able to go a single place in their lives without an adult driving them until maybe they got a license at 16-17 and seemed very limited in their development for it.
-------
tl;dr - I think the idealized version of a suburb can be good for it, the average US suburb can't stay that way, but I also think major cities offer a lot of potential for them. Denser + walkable medium towns + nature outside them could also be good - but that's more of a EU than US development pattern.