The Innovator’s Dilemma supports your last paragraph but will likely make your first two paragraphs age poorly.
The tech will continue to improve if it finds its niche. Dynamic, low power, color informational signage displays are a big enough market by themselves to adopt and support enough product cycles to address shortcomings that advertisers have.
The potential for no mains power (e.g., small solar panel or a vibration energy harvesting power source) means virtually any flat wall could be turned into advertising inventory. Do accident lawyers need their ads to pop or just be displayed over and over again?
What you say could be correct for a lot of technologies, but not this one. E Ink tech do not have much traction because of "E Ink" the company and their patents. Basically it's highly proprietary and they dont want to give away control over know-how and production. Until major patents expire no one will it touch with a ten-foot pole.
No, X doesn't have a corporate governance structure that requires Chinese government control, because it is a US company.
Companies in China (and especially those of prominence) have formal structures and regulations that require them to cooperate with the government, and sometimes require the companies to allow the government to intervene in operations if necessary.
It is not possible for a CCP official to show up to a board meeting at X and direct the company to take some action, because that isn't how US corporations work.
A CCP official could show up at a Tesla board meeting and announce they're going to seize Gigafactory Shanghai unless Musk takes down some content on X. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference.
Tesla is quite notable as the only foreign automaker which China has allowed to operate independently in China. All of the rest of them were forced to joint venture with 51%+ control being handed over to a Chinese domestic company. So, really it's pretty surprising that they haven't done that even before Musk owned X.
But regardless, there is a huge difference between a request and actually having managerial authority -- the most obvious being that someone with managerial authority can simply do whatever they want without trying to compel someone else. Also, X, being subject to US law, must comply with that no matter what consequences Musk is threatened with. So, any threats may have limits in what they can practically accomplish.
Note: CA (un)FAIR Plan is not underwritten nor operated by the State of California. It is a state-mandated insurer of last resort run by an association of admitted insurers. If it experiences losses that exceed its assets and reinsurance coverage (which its president has said is a real probability), then every admitted policyholder in CA would be assessed a fee over the course of 1-3 years to cover the gap.
The CA FAIR Plan only offers $300/sq foot to rebuild, which is far less than the $500-1000/sq foot it costs to build new construction in most parts of the state.
In other words: the backstop for the CA FAIR Plan being unable to charge risk-appropriate premiums is an involuntarily assessment of policyholders in lower risk locations.
CA (un)FAIR Plan is required to periodically attempt to find and place policyholders with alternate carriers if there are options. They operate a clearinghouse to do this.
While the FAIR Plan is not required to help a policyholder mitigate their risk, it does offer up to 14.5% discounts off the wildfire peril premium for those who take mitigation actions prescribed by CA Department of Insurance (CDI), including being a member of a Firewise USA Community in good standing, screening vents with 1/8in metal mesh, etc.
All admitted carriers are also required to consider these mitigations actions when determining premiums; however, most of these rate filings have not yet worked their way through the overly bureaucratic CDI review process.
The bigger trend right now is the Wildfire Prepared Home program, which is the only science-based standard recognized by insurers.
No, that's not correct, otherwise SB 1060 would not be moving through the Senate. It's specifically direct insurance companies to consider mitigation.
You also missed the part that the mitigation is only for vegetation hardening. Nothing about structure specific hardening. Which, even if you did control for the vegetation, which AB38 addressed, you're still not guaranteed a discount.
Concerns yes but the better of two evils. I have not tested this consistently but I have leaned towards rather having the plastic contaminants from the RO system than whatever was upstream of the RO. It might be the wrong choice but after living the Bay Area I became too aware of how easy it is for contaminated water to show up from local hot spots.
Edit: What I would add is I often ponder how much additional nanoplastics are getting added compared to what is being removed. I know some of the test suggest RO is adding more but I am not sure if it accounts for the complete life cycle in a bottling plant. For the near term I have just settled that nanoplastics are the lesser evil to me than PFAS and other chemicals within the water. It is scare mongering but I look at how that town in Oregon I believe had has wide spread PFAS contamination in ground water from the airport fire foam.
I'm not too worried. They were looking at bottled water. My home system isn't the same one they were testing. It's similar, it might have similar problems. But I also don't know how often those filters are changed. My filters last 6 months, I would imagine it sheds most of the plastic right away, and you are suppose to drain the first couple gallons. The other components are rarely switched out, only when they break.
Overall, I would think a home system sheds less. Also strung out through that entire article is the fact that all water has plastics. So at this point we are sorta screwed. Pick your poison, chemicals and plastic in your water, or mostly plastic...
iirc, it's not clear what filters were used commercially, based on this article and how exactly it translated to residential system where filters working under much lower pressures
They did the same to the Incan Quipu, which more recent study and discoveries suggest was an actual full written language, not just a counting system.
The conquistadors came across full-fledged empires with sophisticated arts and cultures who’d built cities that dwarfed their European counterparts with building techniques and on terrain that would’ve flummoxed western builders at the time (and still cause us to pause today) and destroyed as much of it as they could put their hands on. Smallpox was the disease, but the Spaniards were the plague.
I agree this is tragic and under-reported, but I think you weaken your case when you exaggerate like this.. Its not a direct contest for "greatness" since they were so different.
As the other response notes, Tenochtitlan was possibly the largest city in the world at the time, and the Aztec empire contained many other cities with populations over 10k. The Inca built a massive empire (8-12M people) centered on the Andean mountains linked together by roads and suspension bridges and built monumental architecture using masonry techniques that are impressive even today. We're just starting to get a handle on the scale of the Mayan empire, because they built their cities in parts of the Guatemalan jungle we have a hard time getting through today - some of the more recent work has found evidence of raised causeway networks stretching over a hundred miles linking large scale settlements. Go further south, and the Amazon jungle basin has been considered uninhabitable because of the density of the jungle and the poor quality of the soil, except that we've found evidence of cultivation of plants and more recent evidence of large-scale settlements and waterworks.
The Spaniards did not walk into a backwards people or somehow just miss what they were looking at - the civilizations and cities they found were advanced and obviously developed and on a scale that, even outside Tenochtitlan, would have rivaled European cities at the time for both size and sophistication.
It's not that much of an exaggeration. Tenochtitlan--the capital of the Aztec Empire--is estimated to have been about 120-150k people at the time of contact, which is larger than any city in the Spanish Empire at the time. Even the Spaniards themselves, as they recorded in their journals, were astonished at the scale of Tenochtitlan.
this story is tragic and it is not widely known, and also..
the story of Jonah in the Hebrew bible describes a city of 100,000+ people .. and that was just one city somewhere at that time.. that was three thousand years ago in the Middle East
Rome reached the million people mark in the 2nd century. All great cities of classical antiquity (familiar to the Spanish of that time) had over 100k pop: Carthage, Tyre, Byblos, Athens, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople...
Malthus was wrong on a ton of things, but his theory of population growth in pre-industrial cities effectively holds to the data (even according to economic historians).
Cities were effectively constrained by available food and transportation costs before the steam engine, so you'd get cycles of population growth, followed by population decline.
Particular places reached support capacity of surrounding land until something caused systemic failure, and population decline. Think of ancient China, for example with its cyclic population growth in a unified empire, followed by some natural catastrophe or political instability -> civil war as the political system weakened.
Because the natives joined in with them. The Aztecs were hated and ruled through military subjugation. They had a strict class system where the warriors were always trying to expand the empire and held most of the power. They required tributary and glory for the warriors (Aztecs started out as mercenaries). They'd invade their neighbors and bring in captives for human sacrifices... During one of their big holidays they "sacrificed" over 20,000 people by ripping open their chests with rudimentary knives.
That was extreme and insane to most of the native inhabitants. And it was even more outrageous to Europeans (or Asians). The Spanish weren't hero's and they exploited the natives and unwittingly spread disease but the Aztec civilization had to go and it died just as much from internal revolt than from the small amounts of European men that Cortes commanded. I have more respect for the Pueblo's than I do for the Aztecs. They survived harsher environments and had impressive self-taught farming and structural engineering skills.
This is not an apologist perspective, my heart weeps for the knowledge that was lost. But from the perspective of the Spanish conquistadors, all of Aztec culture looked like devil worship. Bear in mind these were Catholics who were suddenly immersed in a culture that regularly performed ritual human sacrifice. So they buried their statues and burned their books. It's tragic, but not all that surprising, really.
Up to 1/2 inch thickness... Great. Just need to 4x that to replace 2x4s, the construction material that the entire US home building process is built around.
But looks like it's ready to go for some applications (plywood). Hopefully they can get it thicker and replace more dimensional lumber. Or maybe I'm reading their site wrong?
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