Evidently NASA’s requirements are solely based on their willingess to pay for suits that fit taller/shorter astronauts. The craft themselves could easily handle the extra size (gone are the days of the microscopic mercury/gemini/apollo capsules)...

I was once someone that had a good scientific education, and was young and fit....

But NASA also has height requirements, and I’m too tall - you have to be between 5'2" and 6'3".

Back in the day, TWA used to automatically book me in an exit row everytime I flew them - being 6'6" made a tight fit anywhere else. The fact that they did this for me made me a loyal customer.

And that was when they had far more legroom than other major airlines just as a standard thing.

dataPOG is right - they cut to 31 inches recently. They claim that their new seats actually give more legroom at 31 inches than the old ones did at 32 - but I have doubts on that.

The seats aren’t getting narrower -

Except that the extra charge for premium seating isn’t in line with their extra cost - For example, my last flight it would have meant a 20% increase in cost for the roundtrip, yet they didn’t remove 17% of the seats in that section (the % needed to balance out the cost).

Not only that, but most of the time, I’m flying…

This would be true if they were actually making them narrower. Have you suddenly noticed an increase of room in the aisle? I don’t think so.

Seat widths simply aren’t changing.

The untold parts of this story -

First, you have to be qualified to fly the particular models of planes, which means, for example, to get that $302,000 at Sichuan Airlines, you have to be rated for an Airbus A330 with enough hours to qualify as a captain, not just a first officer. Generally that means that you’re well…

So where did the supply of spare parts for old American cars in Cuba come from? They’ve had NO support for decades and managed to keep those cars running.

Look at Cuba and then tell me that Nicaraguans can’t keep this thing running.

True, electric cars aren’t perfectly clean - but much of the hype about the environmental impact of their manufacturing process is built upon very old practices - like the Sudbury nickel mine which is MUCH cleaner today than it was in the past - but the anti-EV crowd points at their past as evidence as what it is like…

From what I’ve seen, the EV station would be cheaper. The CNG filling stations generally require 240V, so you’re looking at the same wiring costs, but the CNG also requires natural gas work, something the EV doesn’t. The general equipment price seems to be much more expensive for CNG, too.

From what I see, a level 2 EV…

You can get a refilling station to put in your home for CNG if you have natural gas service to your home already. They aren’t cheap or fast, though - they’re generally comparable for refueling rate to a 120V electric charger for an EV.

As for public stations, there are actually 942 public CNG filling stations across…

Of course, those large ships and trains actually have significantly lower emissions per freight ton-mile than trucks do. It’s just concentrated in a single point source.

Actually, it is one of the largest components of your household carbon footprint. According to EPA data, for a family of four with two vehicles in my area, the average total annual CO2 emissions is 57,838 pounds, of which 20,968 pounds are from the cars.

Simply by driving less than average (~7000 miles per year per…

I’ve still got a landline, too. While ubiquitous cell phones have certainly squashed the landline market, part of the problem there was the also the inability of traditional phone companies to see the market changing and adapt. The baby bell in our area is still trying to charge $32 per month for basic landline phone…

Getting the pattern is EASY.

Liability is the really stumbling block there....

Of course, people are irrational, too - most people I know don’t actually consider the total per-mile or per-trip cost of the car they have. Until they understand that, they won’t reach a logical conclusion with the cost comparison to a cut-price robo-driven Uber.

Same thing happens when my coworker goes out and buys…

“In either case, though, Christian told me Tesla replaced the drive units free of charge with 24 hours, so he didn’t lose any money while waiting for repairs to his source of income—something he said was a big issue with his previous car.”

24 hours? That would be unacceptably slow in New York City...

If you watch the videos on this story, it is pretty obviously an eyesore. I can understand the neighbors not liking it one bit - and if the trailer owner was a respectable fellow, he would have consulted his neighbors to see if they could find an amenable approach to the whole issue before just saying “screw you, I’ll…