drone

It hasn't "taken us this long to figure out..." the issues around prescribed burning are fairly modern and related to overreacting/incorrectly responding to some major wildfires that killed lots of people in the late 19th and early 20th century. (See the formation of the USFS and the policies promoted by them, Smoky the Bear, etc.)

Fire was a regular tool in everyone in North America's toolkit, indigenous or otherwise, and not something white people were too stupid to figure out.

Yes, this is a very common activity in electronics manufacturing. Big names, amongst many others are White Horse, Smith & Associates, Rand Technologies, etc.

Depending on the sensitivity and risk to a particular product, it's not uncommon to have a suite of testing done on a sample from every received shipment of a particular good, or set of goods. Testing typically goes beyond counterfeit detection to being within manufacturability and usability specs (e.g. solderability, lot code validation, date code validation, etc.)

Usually priced out of the hobbyist range, think 2-3k to do basic suite verification on a sample of 5 components. That would not include de-capping and die examination.

To be clear: herbicides are not essential in every area, but in some areas it is completely cost-ineffective to promote appropriate diversity and wildlife habitat without some use of it.

FWIW, in the region I'm currently managing a 100-acre habitat that was previously a pine plantation, it would be sacrosanct to "fence out deer." Early stage re-growth is wonderful deer habitat, lots of sunlight generates lots of forbs. However, in the same region I am in, any area left to its own devices becomes quickly overgrown to the point of making poor habitat for wildlife (no viable food, no viable cover, even though it's "thick" it is not useful to species such as deer, rabbits, quail, turkeys, etc. lacking the right kinds of food and cover).

Mechanical and fire (prescribed burns) are our primary tool we use, along with appropriate canopy thinning. However, when dealing with opportunistic species (the most aggressive here being sweetgum and chinese tallow), these methods are not effective. As each of these species re-sprout and spread via roots as well as seed, mechanical and fire only top-kill, resulting in them coming back thicker again within months. Repeated mechanical control presents significant issues both for valuable forb and impacts on land (a skid-steer is very heavy and results in significant compaction of soil, for example) and is incredibly expensive at about $1,000/acre when following proper selective practices.

We were also very much against the use of herbicides, but after numerous conversations with local biologists and forestry management professionals (our state provides them as a service), we finally realized that we were in a losing battle and selective application was the way to go. With basal spraying for larger stems of unwanted species and selective foliar for seedlings, we've reduced our costs to a fraction, reduced the damage to land and erosion, and we're seeing higher value (ecologically, not monetary) habitat with a faster turn time. Our approach is to eliminate all non-native, invasive species, develop the mix of pine savannah and hardwood bottoms our region has historically represented, and we're seeing the returns we expected much quicker than mechanical methods were providing us.

None of the "chemicals" we use are soil-active, and all of them have a half-life measured in days. We don't use them where girdling or sawing are sufficient to open canopy or create snags, and we don't broadly apply them.

I'm glad you live in a region where there are no opportunistic trees and shrubs which will crowd out other species, and where mechanical control is sufficient to restore traditional diversity, but alas, it still doesn't have the same reward everywhere. Anything left to its own devices in this region will rapidly, I mean within 5 years, become what we call the "pine curtain," useless to both wildlife and man. For centuries even the indigenous tribes had to practice regular controlled burning to fight this.

Only one of the trees I listed was invasive, the others are opportunistic natives to their regions that will outgrow everything else.

The nice "diverse" forest you're thinking of in your mind took a long time to become that way, the normal state of nature is to not create a perfect balance out of the gate, but for constant competition and regularly have to cycle through multiple iterations of configuration which are, by all means, not as productive or valuable for wildlife/nature as their final states. None of that means that using a herbicide is sufficient, but without, you're looking at potentially hundreds of years to get back a usable environment for wildlife that is well-balanced vs 10's of years.

Outside of a few soil-active herbicides, most of what they use is one-and-done and can be applied selectively to only problem plants with minimal unintended consequences.

Glyphosate is not soil active, so there are no "trees that can grow in glyphosate-doused soil."

The primary reason for broad herbicide treatment as part of site prep is to avoid low-value, or ecologically opportunist species that thrive in disturbed soil/land, and prevent either the target species from growing, or create an environment which lacks the diversity necessary for the region. For example, sweetgum, huisache, black locust, chinese tallow (as examples from specific regions in the US), will all take over and completely dominate a deforested section and prevent oaks, pines, etc. and appropriate forb for wildlife without consistent, ongoing burns.

FWIW, there are no "trees which are GMOd to live with glyphosate application" - you're thinking non-tree crops. Nearly every softwood and hardwood tree is susceptible to damage from Glyphosate.

No, "quotes" being prices offered to customers. In context, it is correct, they're saying that they're quoting higher prices to prospective customers.

Even in Houston, which is an exceptionally hot and humid city in the summer, and cold and humid in the winter, outdoor dining is ubiquitous across the city in all seasons. A popular restaurant down the street from me is outdoor-only and stays packed in the evenings year round. There is no dearth of outdoor dining in the US.

On monsoon days, or during periods of peak heat/cold? Yes, the outdoor table attendance is down, but rarely zero.

As others have stated though, outdoor dining in other cities is typically nothing at all like what the Atlantic is discussing in NYC. NYC wasn't built for outdoor dining, but it has nothing to do with being car-centric, or too hot/humid.

The official terms at play here are "modular" and "mobile" home. These are the terms that define the kind of house you're thinking of. "Mobile" homes are constructed to a separate set of parameters, and are not "permanently" mounted on the property. (Regardless of how "permanent" you make the attachment for a "mobile" home, it is still titled separately from the land.)

Modular is the term of art for a factory-built home that is installed on the land and becomes titled as "real property" with the land its self, search for "modular home builders." Nearly every modular builder also builds mobile homes, so when you go to their site, look for "available as modular" or "modular" as a category or search term.

FWIW, "modular" and "mobile" are actually built to two different manufacturing requirements and specification, and why "mobile" homes are often disallowed in towns and cities, amongst other reasons, is that HUD controls the specs for "mobile" while "modular" must meet local building codes.

AFAICT, these range from $84-$170/sq ft for exterior materials only, no labor, no insulation, no foundation. If you're looking to DIY something and want an easy start, these and many other options may be a good choice for you, but this is very expensive for some markets, given you just have materials for the shell.

Generally speaking, it's best to think in "heated + cooled sq feet" for comparison, and also consider the foundation type. These are post-frame, so in the market where I had built, $120/sqft for post-frame is "cheap/budget", and $300/sqft is "high-end". We paid $180/sq ft, and that included electrical work, plumbing, appliances, A/C, full custom cabinets, custom windows, etc. As you can see, these aren't a great deal in that regard, but your local market conditions may vary.

You need to work with a builder, since we were working in a somewhat "rural" area, we couldn't work with any of our local builders (in the city where we live), without going way out of budget due to travel expenses, etc.

As to how we found the builder? Google was of little help, and nearly everyone with a website was saying things like "we start at $250/ft for a barndo" -- basically, insane pricing.

What we ultimately did: I went to local stores, talked to neighbors, and started asking them for references for different parts of the process - e.g.: well building, dirt work, etc. I aligned on the most common people they referred, then asked each of them the same two questions: who do you like working with as a GC, and who built your house? Everyone aligned on a single person, so I called him and the rest is history.

As someone who recently went through the pre-fab house market for a weekend/cabin build for a property we own, this product suffers from the same problem nearly every other pre-fab "designer" product we saw out there: the cost is substantially more than custom-built and the time to deliver is as long, or longer.

I mention "designer" since there is a pre-fab market for non-designer homes, which do come pretty close to the mission of being a better value without being a "mobile home" - think Pratt, etc.

Ultimately, we went stick-built on-site and paid roughly 35-50% per sq ft of what a comparable pre-fab designer home would have cost, while allowing us to focus costs on the aspects of the house that mattered most to us, while going budget where it didn't matter as much, and still having full control over the process. FWIW, for less than the price of this unit alone, we had a full custom 1,200 sqft house 3BR/2Bth, metal garage, 800' driveway, well, septic, and 1-acre pond built.

I can see if you're willing to pay the premium on the design aesthetics, but designer modular houses have a long way to go to being a more affordable option for most buyers.

MacroFab | Development, QA, Sales, Engineering, Support, Marketing | Houston, TX + Guadalajara, MX + Remote | https://macrofab.applytojob.com/apply

At MacroFab, we're building the world's first distributed manufacturing marketplace for electronics. We work with customers both large and small to automate pricing, streamline supply chain, and move workloads from Asia to North America.

We're growing rapidly, and hiring across the board in all positions. Both remote, and local in Texas and Mexico.

For software development, we're primarily a Python and React/JS shop, that heavily leverages numerous AWS technologies.

MacroFab | Frontend, Backend, Product, and more | Full-Time | Remote or Onsite (Houston, TX; Guadalajara, MX) | https://macrofab.com

MacroFab is the first digital marketplace for electronics manufacturing. We manufacture electronics products in North America (US, Mexico, and Canada) by utilizing excess capacity at existing contract manufacturers. Automated pricing, job management, logistics, purchasing, and more are managed through our advanced manufacturing platform.

With offices in Houston and Guadalajara, both onsite and remote work are available.

Our software stack is primarily Python on the backend and React on the frontend, running in a mixed server and server-less environment in AWS, utilizing a variety of data stores and other technologies.

We are growing rapidly and have numerous positions available in Product Management, Backend, Frontend, Full-stack, Technical Program Management, Marketing, Sales, and Operations.

For a full list: https://macrofab.applytojob.com/apply

MacroFab | Houston, TX | Onsite or Remote | Multiple Positions

MacroFab is the first marketplace for electronics manufacturing. With a self-service digital manufacturing platform, and hundreds of manufacturing lines available, we help organizations bring new products to market in North America and manage their entire product catalogs from low to mid-volume production. Our mission is to enable manufacturing to operate as a true cloud resource.

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You bring back memories for me - I worked for one of the first rural ISPs in Indiana in '95. Having to debug people's Winsock setups over the phone still makes me shudder a bit. Not to mention the Apple customers, where I didn't even have a Mac available to me and I learned by trial and error - pretending like there were dynamic outcomes for every customer "Yes, now read off for me what that screen says."

The fun one was introducing people to basic concepts, like "Ok, that thing is your mouse, see the two buttons? Let me explain how you're going to use them on this call.

They're not. SupplyFrame has traditionally been a software vendor for companies in the electronics manufacturing space. The blogs and Tindie are a very, very small part of their portfolio.

For example, there's QuoteFX, DirectSource, DesignSense, FindChips, and a host of other solutions they sell.

Yes, they very much do. I'm not entirely sure how to square the GP's comment.

Most of the issues as-of-late have been areas that didn't previously flood. The areas which flood change as development increases.

Houston also has pretty substantial regulation around flood mitigation and such these days. I'm not sure how that relates to this article in any way, which is focused on zoning, minimum lot size changes, and neighborhood-based opt-out on loosened regulations.

One might argue that the original sin of RH is marketing to people who don't have a grasp of how these systems work and not being used to having to learn these things when dealing with a consumer product.

Some of the barriers to dealing with traditional brokerages created opportunities to learn, and to put one's self into the mindset that this is a thing that is new and complex (on your first encounter), and your general approach should be researching each new thing you're trying. Heck, just the signup and annual reporting requirements on IB will make you think long and hard about each type of transaction you might want to do.

I can get behind making a business out of it, but I wonder what the long-term effects of trying to gamify and consumerify stock trading is going to have on laws, regulations, and the overall market conditions going forward. (I know what RH would say, they're "levelling the playing field for the average Joe!" But, you know, Fidelity & co. did that a long time ago - they just didn't gamify it, they gave you access to it largely as it was.)

Right! They have 11 house-brands at the moment, probably a few more they haven't bothered to update the website with. I don't recall any of it ever looking generic, but then again, it could've have years ago - but my buffers have flushed a few times since then.

https://www.heb.com/static-page/Our-Family-of-Brands

Yes, these sorts of things are common in photography workflows. There are color profilers [ex: 0] that update your monitor's profile in real time to maintain a consistent profile given ambient light changes.

They're usually used as part of a larger calibration workflow, for example: calibrating your monitor and printer so that what you print with a specific ink/paper combination looks exactly like what you see on the screen. (Or, as much as is technically possible to do so.)

[0] https://www.xrite.com/categories/calibration-profiling/i1dis...

I'm not sure of any free speech "purist" that conflates the government with private parties. Regardless of how much "power" or "authority" the private party has. In fact, by every measure I've ever seen, a free speech "purist" would specifically say that Twitter has the right to amend, change, alter, or provide any opinion they so choose, no matter how much "authority" they may or may not have.

Every free speech "purist" I've ever met limits their opinion of control to the government.

VCs don't subsidize the transaction cost (unit economics), they subsidize the (customer) acquisition cost. That is to say, they don't want you losing money on the execution of the transaction, but if the sum total of net revenue from a customer's transactions don't equal the cost to acquire (market, etc.) the customer -- there's the subsidizing.

If you went to a VC with a model for a food service delivery taking less than 30% of the transaction, they'd more than likely pass. 30% is the bar that's been set, and your unit economics have to be as good or better than the existing players. They're not keen on investing in "just a cheaper version of something that already exists." -- If you're marketing yourself as "cheaper," it has to because some innovation has eliminated more cost out of the transaction than you have eliminated in net revenue.

Yes, most of the major oilfield service companies have started layoffs, and they're starting to ramp up. During the last oil downturn, 2015-16, it wasn't just the O&G upstream/downstream companies, it heavily impacted manufacturing (Houston is a big manufacturing center) companies, real-estate, etc.

We're already starting to see some of this, but it's also getting swept up with the pandemic lockdown, so it's hard to tell one apart from the other ATM, except that oilfield services are shedding employees quicker than other large firms, anecdotally.

Edit: it's worth noting that while the last downturn was heavily impactful on the energy, manufacturing, and real estate sectors, the recovery was pretty quick as the overall impact to the economy was about 1.6% down, and the rest of the overall economy was booming.

Likewise, on 3/25 a Dr. in New Orleans [0] also reported they were stopping using it as it wasn't helping and the side-effects were problematic.

"Plaquenil which has weak ACE2 blockade doesn't appear to be a savior of any kind in our patient population. Theoretically, it may have some prophylactic properties but so far it is difficult to see the benefit to our hospitalized patients, but we are using it and the studies will tell. With Plaquenil's potential QT prolongation and liver toxic effects (both particularly problematic in covid 19 patients), I am not longer selectively prescribing this medication as I stated on a previous post."

[0] https://texags.com/forums/84/topics/3102444

You can also access it remotely, too, which is nice. If you don't have a fixed IP/don't want to manage firewall rules, they have a central service that creates the handshake between your remote device and your NVR to facilitate the connection.

Agreed, that was a great episode. Here's a direct link for those interested: https://www.themeateater.com/listen/meateater/ep-179-the-wee...

I know it to be true. Outside of the textual example I posted in my original post, here's a visual example: https://pasteboard.co/IloR6Hv.png

The highlighted tracks are private, mud-ridden trails on private property. If I'm sitting in that house, and ask Google to direct to me to the address directly north of my location, it will direct me to take that trail to the north. Which, BTW, will lead me to a locked gate and another trail on the other side of the fence. The correct answer is to send me south to the county road, east to the next county road, north to the next county road, and then west via county road due north of where I am. Those trails are not roads that google would otherwise know about.

This happens more often than not on my trips through more rural areas (once, it sent me through a muddy corn field to avoid a traffic jam on Christmas night in rural Louisiana -- fortunately I understood what I was getting in to and had a vehicle equipped to handle it), and I've noticed it seems to have more to do with people who have google maps keeping their phones with them.

That is to say, it tracks where people drive, and when people drive in the same place often, it flags it as a common route and therefore must be a road! I have a hunting lease in rural Texas, and the most common trails within the property are all highlighted as roads in Google maps. In fact, as I cleared out a trail a year ago and started using that trail as a way to reach one point on the ranch, it has now also become highlighted!

You'd be a fool to cut someone's locked gate to take such a route, but it does offer them as routes to me were I to ask how, for example, to arrive at the entrance gate of the property north of us. The only legal (and passable) route is actually to go south, then east, then north, then west. However, google maps says "Hey, just take this trail straight north."

I love OnX. Between it, and the USFS PDF maps (which can be keyed to GPS using other free apps), I've been able to do a bunch of exploring.

For example, last December, I drew a tag for the Whetstone mountains in AZ. The primary route that everyone used into the western side of the mountain range was a 2.5 hour drive in from the far west, with significantly challenging terrain toe cross. However, between OnX and the USFS maps, I was able to find a route from the south that had an unmarked, but official, USFS service road through private property.

Without that kind of info, I would never have even thought to approach the gate into the property (other hints at arrival help - there was a USFS placard saying to keep gate closed). It saved me dozens of hours of travel during the trip as we were staying in a nearby town.

In certain parts of America, we have. Klobasniky (most people just call 'em kolaches) are incredibly popular in Texas, perhaps even more popular than hot dogs.

The fun part, is that in theory, the klobasniky came from the Czech via the kolache, and then came back to Czech republic from Texas filled with meat. =)