It certainly can't be leading to more government services. We get less every year. There might be more spending, but there's fewer results. We can't build trains, our police don't stop crime, healthcare covers less and costs more every year.
Instead of getting a local locksmith, it's a "lead gen" service which charges the locksmith $100 or something to get your info. They're placed on the map, but aren't actually there.
The only thing that should come up is actual local locksmiths.
Here in Washington State, a decade ago we had an initiative (I-732) to do a carbon tax and lower regressive taxes (we have one of the most-regressive tax structure in the USA). The environmental groups opposed it because it wasn't handing out money to them and it lost narrowly.
Eventually the legislature passed a complicated cap-and-trade scheme and they spend the money on bullshit and lie about it: "The projects the department touted amounted to just under 4% of their original estimates." https://phys.org/news/2026-01-washington-state-overestimates...
That's fine, but you need to include the cost of having barely-used gas peaker plants when calculating the cost of "renewables+storage". Laymen keep using arbitrary "marginal cost of solar with sun shining" to say "solar is cheaper than everything!". If it's true that capex of 80% gas peaker (and LNG storage and employees on standby and so on) + solar + wind + batteries is cheaper, then people should make that argument and provide the data.
The latest figures from ember etc are not only “sun shining”, they’re talking about 24hr firmed solar-storage costs, and they’re still mostly cheaper than fossil in most geos. It is true that we will have to pay for having gas fill the gaps - how much exactly is a very complicated function of market economics and real time power auctions. Depends on so many variables, how big is the shortfall, how long, what competition does the gas have locally and extra-geographically, many other things. For connected countries in Europe you are never going to get to a situation where you need an 80% sized backup to your production, there will always be varied other sources. And perhaps you just choose to load shed in truly black swan scenarios, rather than paying for enough backup for every possible rare scenario. Life does go on.
Though I confess predicting it is beyond me and I’m not sure how you would model it to achieve conclusions generally applicable to every country / market .
Each of those existing plants were competitive against coal at the time without having the negative externalities of widespread radiation exposure (uranium in coal just released to the atmosphere); mercury contamination in all our freshwater lakes and the ocean, leading to strict limits on consuming fish for children and pregnant women; and a half-century of CO2 emissions.
Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.
The proper solution is a thick layer of petroleum jelly over your skin. The larva has to come up to breathe eventually (~hours). Use tweezers and grab it. Gross, but perfectly safe.
The jet planes are flying much higher and are loaded; I'm assuming this one was empty. That would account for the power discrepancy.
Finally, I think you might be still high on the power cost. $.10/kwh is retail cost in the PNW, they might be, um, bullshitting a little and have purchased power at a very good rate at a particular time just so they could say $5. They didn't say every flight would be $5. So energy could have been 3x more than you estimated.
You could design in an electric autonomous-returning JATO-like system to allow for extended distance flights.
Oh, even better, you're always going to have enough propeller power to take off. Extremely high power-density batteries on a glider which detaches at cruising altitude and flies back to the airport? Oh, you fly even higher than normal before detaching to transfer even more energy into PE?
Hmm, shouldn't electric be able to fly even higher? But they're short range, so probably not worth it ... yet.
True, but you'd need, at minimum, a well-trained crew to operate. The catapult settings vary by take-off weight. Who manages that? Does each airline run their own crew (contract) as they do other ground services? Or does the airport run it?
The airframes would have be heavier, beefed up to take that load. FWIW, the Navy version of the F-35 weighs ~5000lbs more than the AF version's 29000 dry weight (granted, that's also additional folding wing changes). It also costs about 20% more per unit.
Anyways, it's all certainly possible. Just impractical without a real need.
But catapult launch ballistic passenger gliders would be pretty cool.
Airport crew could do it based on calculated weight comunicated by pilots. With current technology it could even be automated - pull the airplane 10 m at a fixed (low) power setting, determine how fast it accelerated, calculate mass, increase power accordingly for the rest of the takeoff distance. Even an Arduino could do it.
Or simply apply the maximum force supported by the airplane's attachment point (front landing gear) no matter what the weight is.
Airframes would probably not need much strenghtening. I expect that the forces from wheel breaks are aprox. the same.
PS: With a catapult / winch launch, the MTOW could probably be increased a little - more passengers and cargo for the same flight costs.
Pretty sure passengers will object to being catapulted. Kids may love it though.
But realistically you're either imparting 2G and hurting 10% of the passengers, or you may as well not bother with one. The "JATO-like" solution of a modular prop+battery unit giving you a takeoff+climb boost for 10 minutes and then heading back to the airport seems less objectionable.
I'm guessing a 1km long catapult - if not 2km - would be really really tricky. Maybe a long winch with a super super super safe way to detach it as soon as the nose is pointing up?
But, regardless, it's actually shorter than I thought! Although 1G forward acceleration is still quite a bit. Imagine elderly passengers with osteoporosis... and the lawsuits.
Instantaneous 1g might feel like a lot, but a relatively "soft" ramp to 1g would surely mitigate that complaint? I mean, we'd all be buckled into seats. And some sports cars can hit 1g with a good "drag race" start - and yes, that's definitely not something I'd do with granny in the seat, only pointing out it's not a crazy amount of acceleration if a factory-spec Mustang can do it.
Airplane tugs (electric) driven by airport personnel + ground navigation aids would decrease those too, and airplanes won't need to burn fuel waiting in line for takeoff at busy airports.
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