I was thinking she was only going to live long enough to see two Christmases…

I am confused…

Exactly. The military isn’t obligated to look at every single picture and tell you that it’s not a drone. But if they don’t do that, they can’t say “we have looked at every single picture and confirmed there are no suspicious drones”.

The military is rightly refusing to prove a negative.

I mean, its trivial to prove something isn’t Bigfoot on the grounds that Bigfoot Isn’t Real. That’s just Hitchens’s Razor. The burden of proof is on the person presenting the claim, not the one refuting it.

Shifting the burden of proof doesn’t disprove the claim. You can look at a picture and call someone an idiot for believing it’s bigfoot/a drone, but still not be able to swear that there is no way it could possibly be a drone.

They may be making a PR decision to issue warnings rather than actually arrest people.

I don’t see anything in the article that suggests they know drones have gone above their bases but not been identified or dealt with.

I think the reference to not being able to identify everything is in reference to civilian reports.

It’s like trying to disprove Bigfoot. Someone comes to you with a shaky, out of focus video with no audio, time, date, or precise location.

I can’t prove it’s not bigfoot. That doesn’t mean I think it is Bigfoot, or that you should think so.

If you have good video and know where it was shot from and can cross-reference that with aircraft trackers? Then maybe they can do a good investigation. There’s been a few of those where it turns out to pretty obviously be a helicopter, a V-22, or just a 737.

Especially since it’s rather hard to judge scale on airborne things some distance away.

Sorry, could have been clearer. I was talking about random dumb civilians.

Quadcopters have been buzzing military bases for years, basically since they became available to the public.

With all this PR about drones and people sometimes blaming the military, the number of dumb civilians thinking about ‘spying’ on military bases will be on the rise.

“We have had confirmed sightings at Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle,” the spokesperson said. “This is not a new issue for us. We’ve had to deal with drone incursions over our bases for quite a time now. It’s something that we routinely respond to in each and every case when reporting is cited.”

It’s not explicitly stated, but my read is they get normal consumer-style quadcopters regularly, and this is simply a continuation of that. Perhaps an increase because people are now trying to explicitly spy on the military.

The public drone sightings, on the other hand, definitely don’t seem to be consumer quadcopters. They mostly look suspiciously like 737s, V-22s, or out of focus stars.

• Delayed by six months until the news dies down.

That sounds entirely like a store configuration thing.

It can vary depending on how the store sets the machines up. I’m on the wrong continent to use Walmart ones, but there’s definitely variation in how paranoid and slow they are set here.

I feel it’s one of those cases where if you’re familiar with them and can think like the person who designed/programmed them, it can work pretty well. If you get confused by unfamiliar card terminals or a phone doing an update, you’re in trouble.

E.g. it uses an expected weight and tolerance for products going into the scales. If this is produce you’ve just weighed, it’s going to be pretty precise. Same goes for something really light like a toothbrush; a 50% margin on tens of grams is still not much. If it’s a prepacked bag of oranges, then the weight could be way off (add a whole orange over the expected weight) so it won’t alarm on e.g. you putting a reusable shopping bag on the scale with the oranges. This lets you skip the annoying use-your-own-bag process.

Knowing and remembering which is the next button to hit helps a lot.

I find they’re fine for <5 items especially if the store is busy, but for a full trolley, you’re better off with a lane just for staging reasons.

Anal on the other hand…

In some parts of the world, the first two aren’t tipped so income varies less. You’re not going to get as many shifts in the off-season, I guess.

I’d argue that jobs with uncertain hours or poor notice should have an automatic +50% minimum wage modifier on them.

Choice of sub seems a bit weird?

It’s always mass production. They’re not making them by the millions. Messing around with glass and vacuums is a pain

There’s a good chunk of the world where you don’t ever have to water lawn, except when initially seeding it.

Fibre needs bigger bend radii proportional to the cable size, but they’re still rarely over 15mm diameter cables so you can bend them in like 150mm.

Once you start getting to 11kV MV cables, they do like 2m bend radii.

Yeah, directional thrusting is a thing. It was used a lot when contractors were installing NZ’s new fibre network about a decade ago. I don’t think it’s in as widespread usage for power because power cables tend to have much wider bending radii.

I expect structural life of the tunnels isn’t much longer than the services within them, especially with roads above.

Boring through rock is super slow and expensive, plus now your tunnel needs to be big enough to walk & run machines through, and needs aircon to keep it cool. It is done, but usually only in CBD areas where you need lots of cables and room for future expansion. Google ‘cable tunnel’ and you’ll find lots of examples. Trenching machines go through very expensive consumable digging teeth whereas bucket trucks are just a fancy forklift, burning fuel and needing hydraulic & engine maintenance.

With high voltage cables, the (really thick) insulation gets really expensive, plus you need more conductor (copper/aluminium) because the insulation needs to stay cool. Aerial lines are directly air cooled (better cooling), and can run hotter, because the limit is the metal getting too hot and sagging, not the plastic degrading. Glass insulators are only needed at every tower and can be easily replaced.

Because keeping the conductor small is important, you need to use expensive copper rather than cheap aluminium for cables.

You also need regular joints which are very labour intensive, because they have to be perfect and you can’t make a cable the full length because you can’t ship a drum that big.

If a cable fails, fixing it is much harder than fixing an aerial issue. There was a cable fault in LA in 1989 that took 8 months of round-the-clock work to fix. When a tower falls over (usually because of slope failure or undermining), temporary structures are usually up in a couple of days.

Digging trenches under roads is much more invasive than pulling cables over roads, and rivers are even worse to deal with. It’s very common for underground cables to be converted to overhead when they cross a river before heading back underground.

The Western HVDC Link between Scotland and England was built as an undersea cable because it’s so hard to get planning permission and land rights to do major projects in the UK, as High Speed 2 found out.

Yeah, we have lots of underground services here in NZ. It’s when you start getting to low population densities that you start having trouble doing it.