Live in ex-urban MA and it’s not common but have had a couple of multi-day power outages in both winter and summer over the decades I’ve lived here. Don’t remember the details of the summer outage but the winter one was a massive ice storm.
The major ice storm I remember might have been 2012 or 2013. There was also a different snow storm (maybe that was 2010?) at the end of October when all the leaves were still on the trees. My parents lost power for something like 6 days (so much damage the crews were swamped). I had been visiting them, and gtfo as the snow was falling, and never lost power 2 hours away.
I think this comes back to the framing of the article, stated as universal truths when it's really just someone who was woefully unprepared for a snow storm and subsequent power outage. Life threatening and horribly inconvenient for them yes, but nowhere near a universal experience.
Prepare a few days ahead getting groceries, gas, etc. Make sure firewood totes are full. It starts snowing. Do a little shovel work to keep fire fed, if power goes out (rare, but always possible of course) a little more shovel work to set up generator. Wait for snow to stop, clean up with snowblower/tractor/shovels/etc, taking a variable number of sessions depending on how much snow fell.
The main lesson is "be prepared", not all the little things the author got surprised by due to a wholesale lack of preparation.
Going wholesale generator prep takes a lot of effort and money. Never gone quite that far. I did have a major outage in, I think, 1998. Ice storm was bigger in Canada than where I live in Massachusetts although still ended up with power being out for multiple days.
I'd say the cost highly depends on what you put into it. 2-pole breaker ($30), OFBRND transfer lockout ($20), 20ft of NM-B for inlet right next to service entrance ($35), OFBRND inlet and extension cord ($100). Then a small synchronous generator $250? So that's <$500 total? Of course you'll find yourself saying I want a bigger generator, I want non-OFFBRAND electrics, I want this other extra, and the total cost creeps up.
As an adolescent in Fayette (Maine), I had great fun helping out our neighbors with summertime tree-pruning parties. FWIW we had few power issues during winter, and our winters frequently featured 4-6 feet of snow cover.
> Transferring money across regions with the best 'normie' tools (eg Transferwise/wise.com) is multiple orders of magnitude more expensive than $0.0000015 (tranferring USDC or another GENIUS-compliant stablecoin on Solana).
I don't see how that's relevant to YC startups. Startups can't legally pay their employees in crypto through transfers, any more than they can write checks out of their bank account or pay their employees in cash. I've paid an overseas employee in BTC before, but we still had to go through a payroll provider and do everything above-board to satisfy IRS requirements.
I'm curious why you can't legally pay in crypto?
I heard a few times about companies paying in crypto to their remote workers. In fact I heard that a US company was paying in BTC withing the US, though I'm not sure I trust this particular story. I also see that Deel accepts USDC, and to my understanding they convert to local currency of the remote worker.
Is that all illegal? Truly want to understand.
It's not illegal, but you have to do all the paperwork the same as if you pay in USD. That means tax withholdings and all that, on a per-pay-period basis. Doing this basically means going through a payroll provider. When I had an employee we paid in BTC, we had to go through a licensed company to actually do the BTC payment to our overseas worker (Circle).
The way it worked was our payroll provider would release the paycheck in USD to Circle, who would do conversion to BTC at prevailing exchange rates same day before executing the transfer.
If we already had the money in BTC, we would have had to convert the money to USD to send to our payroll provider so they could do withholdings and all that, and then have Circle convert it back to make the transfer.
There are foreign transfer reporting requirements and rules about currency conversion at payment time so that you can't skirt paying taxes. If you try to do it yourself you're making a lot of extra work for yourself.
You misread. You can't legally pay through transfers (between wallets). You need an intermediary that verifies identity linked to wallets and does escrow to satisfy anti-fraud requirements.
It's probably legal as long as you do all the same accounting/withholding that you would normally do. I suspect some companies are forgetting to do that, just as many people forget to report taxes on crypto.
It's not illegal to pay W-2 employees in US currency as long as you satisfy IRS withholding and reporting requirements. Paying employees in non-currency assets (gold, crypto, etc.) is highly regulated since it's often used as a tax-evasion scheme.
I found that surprising, so I looked on Wikipedia.
Soyuz-2 capacity to LEO: 8,600KG
Falcon 9 capacity to LEO: 22,800KG when expended, 17,500KG when not.
Soyuz-2 Cost to Launch: $35 Million
New Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $70 Million
Used Falcon 9 Cost to Launch: $50 Million (cost to SpaceX: ~$25 Million)
Soyuz-2 cost per KG: $4000 (data from 2018)
New Falcon 9 cost per KG: $964 when expended, $1250 when not.
Use Falcon 9 coster per KG to Customer: $893 when expended, $690 when not
So realistically, Falcon 9 is roughly 20-30% the price per KG when new, and dropping to a minimum of 17.25% of the price when used.
Plus you get a larger diameter payload fairing and the ability to launch a payload up to 4X the size.
I'm pretty sure that even used as an expendable rocket, 1/4 the price per KG (if you need the capacity) is a pretty significant improvement. Now I understand why satellite ride-shares are so popular!
Tesla unveiled the Roadster 20 years ago. That's plenty of time for other companies to catch up. They made a bet that once the battery moat evaporated the millions of miles of driving footage, powering affordable fully autonomous driving, would be their next moat. They failed, not because camera-based FSD is a silly idea (we drive with our eyes after all), but because it's a really hard problem. If they had won that bet, Tesla would justify its valuation. They didn't, and so we're left with the flailing of a doomed company.
> the stores you need are within a 5 min walk, or more likely, right by the subway exit when you’re returning from work, you buy stuff as you need it, rather than stocking up for days.
Yeah, so for me that changed after having kids. Once I had to spend 30 minutes a day running around to various stores because we were always running out of everything it wasn't fun anymore.
Furthermore, specialist stores charge higher prices for the same goods because they don't have the pricing power of a large supermarket. It makes a material difference once you have a family.
Urban supermarkets are great because they give you the option of getting everything in one place when you're pressed for time, and they're usually not as large as suburban ones. Mine has a direct entrance from the subway station, so I don't even have to go aboveground.
I discovered flot during my academic research career circa 2008 and it saved my ass more times than I can count. I just wanted to say thank you for that. I wouldn't be where I am today without your help :)
reply