Paradoxically, here in the midwest even the cheapest of cheap big box stores has a snow-rated roof, and since solar panels usually run warm enough to not get much snow build-up, they just have to be lighter than whatever the snow-load would be for that part of the roof.
The other plan would be to hang panels down the…

Is it irony that “Don’t mess with Texas” was an anti-littering campaign message, and now people use it to imply Texas is somehow bad-ass?

Chicagoan here. The trouble with tomatoes most of the year, they’re being trucked hundreds or thousands of miles on the hopes that they’ll “ripen in transit” which never really works out, and the corporate farms are all trying to grow tomato varieties that have been bred or engineered with those logistics in mind.

I hang out with alot of cigar smokers, and anecdotally at least, those we know who smoke and have managed to get COVID over the last two years seem to have had very mild cases - and many of these (mostly) dudes are not exactly super fit and/or healthy to begin with.

Nah. I’d start on the finance side. As soon as banks, brokerages, VC firms and hedge funds get busted up, the entities they have equity in (i.e. every other company) will have to follow one way or another. This will also have the nice added effect of rippling out internationally.

The vertical monopolies are the most insidious I think. Microsoft got run through the anti-trust ringer back when they were just bundling a browser into the operating system. Now they make hardware, the software that runs it, they produce/publish content, and the ads that interrupt it and the search engine that sorts…

The Chinese and Saudi investments are a bigger deal than any perceived threat of divestment.

...or require passengers to keep their phones ON during takeoff or landing and use an app to gauge their altitude and position.

5g has been coming down the pike for a few years now, and this is all just grandstanding and hyperbole for some political points. My guess is the airlines are now deeply regretting not bidding for some of that spectrum, or seeking a carve-out for yet-to-be-implemented aviation tech, and find themselves painted into a…

Cellphones, particularly when roaming, used to crank out orders of magnitude more power than they do now. I could totally see an old bag or brick phone interfering with plenty of circuitry - hell, they used to disable the seatback phones during takeoff or landing for basically the same reason.

The Wisdom of Solomon (tm) would seem to indicate if some enterprising young techsters could only create a retro-fit for the radio altimeter that uses 5G tower pings, everybody could win.

In fairness, getting Red-Blooded Americans (tm) to pick sides between the Chinese Communist Party and a Muslim ethnic minority was probably gonna be an uphill battle the whole way.

Gonna go out on a limb and suppose this doesn’t apply to Foxconn workers, or anybody else down the manufacturing line, where the pay disparities get (allegedly) really wild.

Halon will displace O2 and suffocate anybody trapped inside. Argonite is a blend of Argon and Nitrogen that accomplishes the same fire suppression, but supposedly maintains enough breathable O2 to escape.  Still, I imagine an overbuilt system could displace the air fast enough that it would still be dangerous.

I dunno so much about financial ruin...the kid’s got enough white-wing donor/backers lined up for his legal defense fund, he could probably afford to run for Congress.

I feel like there was some degree of collusion from the prosecution also. They weren’t very strenuous in any of their objections... there were a couple opportunities to go for a mistrial or change of venue that they just let slide. It looked alot like just “going through the motions” for the sake of appearances to me.

...and it’s not like he isn’t going to sell payload space, advertising, passengers, telemetry data, etc. along the way to recoup some of that cost.

Ya gotta realize first that a Yellowstone roadtrip means at least a couple days in the car for like 90% of the population. Most American workers can’t even get their employer to put their regular days off next to each other on the calendar, let alone aligning with the spouse and the kids for a week or more.

Influenza A H3N2 was definitely one of the four strains in this year’s flu shot, so it just remains for the public health and statistics wonks to figure out how effective the shots are this season. Did those 100+ who got flu shots but still got sick have milder symptoms and shorter duration of illness?

Don’t be so glum, chum. It’s early enough in the season that some of those infected might have only recently been vaccinated, and so didn’t have full protection yet. Plus colleges are cesspools for community transmission...they eat, sleep, party, and (occasionally) study in pretty close contact with each other. …