I used PyPy extensively at a previous employer. The use case was to accelerate an application that was CPU-bound because of serde, which could not be offloaded using multiprocessing. PyPy resulted in a 10x increase in message throughput, and made the project viable in python. Without PyPy, we would have rebuilt the application in Java.
gc.freeze prevents considering the objects in gc, but doesn’t disable reference counting so you’ll still have CoW issues. PEP 683 introduces a way to make an object immortal which disables reference counting, which will address that issue.
Florida is connecting Miami, Ft Lauderdale, and Orlando this year for a total cost of $3-4 billion. That’s $7.3 million per mile, and it was mostly paid for by private enterprise instead of the government. Development started in 2012, with Miami to West Palm Beach opening in 2018. CHSR started development in 2008, and isn’t slated to operate anything until 2029. When it does operate, it’ll link Merced and Bakersfield.
Florida will be operating the fastest trains in the US this year.
Conventional rail is, of course, a lot cheaper than high-speed rail; this isn't a revelation.
It's also a one train per hour service. CHSR:
> In addition, the achievable operating headway between successive trains must be less than 5 minutes
While CHSR _is_ definitely on the expensive side for high speed rail, it's a little silly to compare it to the Florida system, which is a fairly standard intercity rail.
Incidentally, I'm not saying there's anything _wrong_ with the Florida system; I've no idea of the background, but it may be that the expected ridership didn't justify a high-speed high frequency system. It's very much not comparing like for like, though.
I live on a dirt road, out in the country. It was built by a contractor, who was selling farmland for housing, 50 years ago.
Instead of digging down, putting aggregate(gravel, etc), the road was just laid over farmland, with a foot of gravel.
Once the municipality took over, it was fine for a while, but maintenance costs were through the roof. Springtime flooding, washouts, and heavy trucks woild sink (no drainage, mud) in the spring.
Eventually, the municipality had to dig down 4ft, put in proper drainage and gravel base, to reduce failure and ongoing maintenance costs.
(I'm in Canada, and frost/snow/ice creates loads of maintenance, especally without drainage.. a southern American in Arizona might wonder what the big deal is)
Anyhow, now there are laws for road quality and developers here, 50 years later, bit I wonder....
Could that private rail developer be shifting initial cost, to higher maintenance costs?
And further, mountains have issues with freezing/etc, and it does make a massive diff...
It uses a lot less energy for people to live in a warm climate with air conditioning than a cold climate with heat. The US spends four times more on heating than cooling, primarily because of greater temperature differences.
Responsible environmentalists should set an example for everyone else and move to an area where heat isn’t required, then they can also choose to live without air conditioning.
The Texas power grid failed in the winter, not the summer.
It took me a long time to realize this I think because heating your house by 40 degrees F in the winter feels cozy and normal, while AC is loud and drippy and somehow feels unnatural even though mostly it only needs to drop 15 degrees.
>The Texas power grid failed in the winter, not the summer.
It could fail this summer due to insufficient capacity relative to demand. Alerts and calls for conservation have been provided starting last week, this time the lion's share of the increased risk can be attributed to air conditioning alone.
This occurred for a different reason in the winter because it got so unusually cold that the nominal water content of the natural gas froze in critical places within the delivery system and the gas could not be provided to the gas-fired electrical power plants. Unprecedented electrical climate-control demand was also a factor then.
When we were freezing in the dark with nothing but electrical heaters and no electricity, I didn't know how the traditional homes having natural gas connections fared. Nobody has gas lights any more but plenty still have gas heating & cooking. Natural gas is also often supposed to fuel household emergency generators, maybe they were OK to some extent. Liquified propane is a much more expensive alternative fuel gas and that's stored on site, but it could also possibly become obstructed by ice if it gets cold enough.
One thing about the way natural gas burns and electricity is made.
Traditionally it takes enough gas to heat 3 homes in order to produce the electricity to heat one home.
Regardless of price.
Not all of the energy from the gas is recovered either way, and after the electricity is delivered to the residence it is converted to heat more efficiently than gas but it's too late then to say there is a favorable comparison overall.
This leaves gas heat still less environmentally detrimental compared to electrical heat when the electricity is from a gas fired plant.
Pricing between these options when available can be expected to exaggerate uncertainties when comparing apples to oranges so there is that. Your pricing may vary, greatly.
Then there's the traditional thing about the way electricity heats and the way it cools.
Once you've got the electricity and you want to use it for temperature control, then it takes about 4 times as much electricity for an air-conditioner to make it one degree cooler than it takes for an elecric heater to make it one degree hotter.
Those electric heaters are wicked efficient on an electrical kWh basis.
But if you're on batteries you could easily conclude that any electric climate control is out-of-the question.
The remaining math can be derived from your own personal situation, and most often it can reveal why air-conditioning was considered nothing but a luxury item for so many generations until consumption got completely out-of-control.
I was lucky enough to get to tour the clean room where they were fabricating the microshutter array at Goddard many years ago. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, since this was before smart phones. I think that really helps contextualize just how long the development process of something like this is. And maybe what it could be capable of if it was built with today's technology.
I think humans are pretty good at finding the optimum strategy. It's only really recently that bots have overtaken us in a lot of highly environmentally complex games.
