batsy71

I live right next to this tree. Interestingly, the city of Palo alto also has some electrical plumbing attached to this tree. Not sure if it's for the tree's health or just some connections for the nextdoor train tracks.

While the technological feat seems logical, I wonder how viable is a business model built around retrofitting human-controlled planes with human out of the loop software.

Given the intricacies of IFR flight and the challenges faced by the self-driving industry, my guess is this will not be a short road to commercial rollout.

Misleading headline. No recent breakthrough has been mentioned in this article, except one made in 2016.

The video says 1000 km of hybrid range. Is that then only 4 refuels from NYC to LA?

From the model showing in the video, the aircraft has 2 vertical stabilizer mounted engines ala trijets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trijet). Barring some smaller jets, this design has ceased in most large airliners for multiple reasons, one of them being the crash of United Flight 232(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232) where the Vert stabilizer mounted engine suffered an explosive dis-integration which in turn structurally damaged the tail sections as well as its hydraulic control lines, rendering the vert stab uncontrollable.

My guess would be the present design has many more significant iterations left.

Common risks are Aircraft skidding of the runway, fire in the wheel well.

Mitigating factors: Rear wheel brakes should still work. Reverse thrust can further help slow down the aircraft.

Given the response time of emergency evacuation + fire response teams, likelihood of mass casualties are low.

The flyer has lot of anti-intuitive designs for example 6 massive fans whirring around the pilot.

What if there is bird strike or the blades somehow dismantle from the fan and fly towards the pilot.

Also this being made for non professional pilots/passengers what if a passenger tries to board/de-board while the fans are still spinning?

At this point, I assume the aircraft keeps morphing into whatever the next iteration of managers/designers deem highest priority to keep the company afloat

Hassle-free international retail trade of equities. A middle class Joe sitting in Maldives being able to buy Beyond Meat stocks on the day of it's IPO.

Also stock markets getting fully automated to remain open 24x7.

Lot of people ignore this, but NATO ally and a bigger Arctic stakeholder of the western world, Canada has a bigger and pretty capable Arctic Icebreaking fleet: http://www.ccg-gcc.gc.ca/icebreaking/home

While, most of us would want to see US get bigger toys, we should collaborate with allies on some of the Polar logistics.

The NIIP (Net International Investment Position) measures whether a country is net debtor vs net creditor.

This wikipedia list from 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_international_investment_p...

has some interesting trends:

1) US is far down below in the list as a net debtor country with the NIIP being 43.4% of its GDP

2) Many erstwhile developing countries like China, India, Nigeria are slowly getting closer to the 0 mark twards net creditor status

3) Venezuela is a net creditor country with NIIP beign 30.5% of the GDP. How does that work for a country that's internally collapsing? Is it from historical oil lending deals to other countries?

Being able to detect which lane of the road you are on is still challenging enough for self-drive technology. A cheap phone sensor most likely doesn't have such spatial resolution.