Reading between the lines, it sounds like the FAA maybe did not trust CBP to "test" operate the high powered laser near civilian aviation, in part given that they mistakenly identified a balloon for a cartel drone.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford on Tuesday night decided to close the airspace — without alerting White House, Pentagon or Homeland Security officials, sources said.
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Customs and Border Protection used the laser weapon earlier this week after training from the U.S. military, according to multiple sources familiar with its deployment. Officials had recently given the FAA a 10-day window in which the technology would be used.
The anti-drone technology was launched near the southern border to shoot down what appeared to be foreign drones. The flying material turned out to be a party balloon, sources said. One balloon was shot down, several sources said.
The Mexican cartels have been running drones on the border lately, the sources said, but it was unclear how many were hit by the military's anti-UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) technology this week. One official said at least one cartel drone was successfully disabled.
> Three U.S. military officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection had been using the technology without issues before Tuesday's shutdown and expressed confusion as to why the shutdown was deemed necessary. [0]
It was definitely the army [1] who fired the laser causing the shutdown of El Paso airport, but the army doesn't seem to understand the alarm on the part of the FAA, because DHS (Border Protection) has been using it for some time now without the same alarm from the FAA. Someone at the FAA reacted differently to this army firing than they had to previous DHS firings.
It's extremely improbable that a random critique of Thiel led to one of the many many many companies he invests in banning this guy. It's not impossible, but - Occam's razor, it's not the simplest assumption.
Your initial post suggested that we should assume that there is a link; now you're backing up to "Thiel takes some blame from bad actions by companies he invests in," which is a much weaker but more defensible claim.
Was I the one to shift the conversation into "incompetence" or did someone else do that thinking it absolves Thiel of any blame? Which I've proven it doesn't and you just agreed with me that it doesn't?
We can go back to my original claim if you want to, but my stance would remain the same as it did it in my first comment: if on one side of the argument we have a company directly funded by Thiel and on the other side we have literally anyone else, I personally don't need any strong evidence to believe that other side, as I am well-familiar with Thiel.
That is the only business model of neobanks: be more incompetent than traditional banks, skirt the laws as much as you can get away with by being "new", raise prices through the roof once you have enough suckers because you have "better UX", raise the prices even further once traditional banks catch up and convince a certain percentage of your users to switch back, shut down entirely once you've burned through the market and cannot convince anyone new to use you.
Only weakly, and closer to "all boeing shareholders are to blame for the accidents associated with the 737 MAX" than what was originally claimed, which was that he was specifically banned as some sort of retribution for his criticism of Thiel.
EVs help with air pollution & congestion, but a huge part of the AQI impact of cars is tires, and I don't think there's a solution for that yet short of "fewer cars"
I thought the tire wear particulates being a huge source of particulate air emissions was an overestimate due to misunderstanding and misquotation of primary literature by secondary literature used by regulatory agencies.
Well, scanning an article on it for Manhattan, the fraction of "road dust" PM2.5 looks like somewhere around 2-5% depending on time of year, which is a bit below contributions by sea salt.
From my limited reading, what fraction of road dust is from tire tread is unclear. The models trying to estimate it give anywhere numbers from 4 to 48%, but may be incorrect due to the citation problem above. Experiments seem to show 4-9%, but they have trouble excluding resuspended dust.
I'd also point out that if we're worried about air quality in NYC between modes of transport, then one should look at subways since PM2.5 in stations/tubes is many times that of the street and far exceeds EPA limits.
EV shuttles will come in lots of capacities. Vans, buses. But you won't need to worry about schedules or preset routes because it's all dynamic.
Wherever there would be the most congestion is precisely where the app will give you the biggest discount to switch from your private vehicle into a bus, then switch back into another private vehicle for the last 5 minutes of your trip.
Also, it may be true that these companies theoretically have the cash flow to cover to spending, but that doesn't mean that they will be comfortable with that risk, especially as that risk becomes more likely in some kind of mass extinction event amongst AI startups. To concretize that a bit, the remote possibility of having to give up all your profits for 2 years to payoff DC investment is fine at 1% chance of happening, but maybe not so ok at a 40% chance.
Yeah. He starts with reasonable points about the economy changing into the Electronic Era and then starts making increasingly less-evidenced points by the end.
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