They're still in existence, just a little wetter than usual.

That doesn't look like a little repair, which is what I had assumed. That looks like the ship's insurer is buying Baltimore a new bridge.

googles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_%28Baltimore%29

The main span of 1,200 feet (366 m) was the third longest span of any continuous truss in the world.

Smooth.

The bridge, at an estimated cost of $110 million

Construction of the Outer Harbor Bridge began in 1972, several years behind schedule and $33 million overbudget.

So $143 million in 1972 dollars...

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

$1.06 billion in 2024 dollars.

EDIT:

https://www.vesselfinder.com/vessels/details/9697428

95k ton displacement.

https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/Convention-on-Limitation-of-Liability-for-Maritime-Claims-(LLMC).aspx

Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims (LLMC)

The Convention provides for a virtually unbreakable system of limiting liability.  Shipowners and salvors may limit their liability, except if "it is proved that the loss resulted from his personal act or omission, committed with the intent to cause such a loss, or recklessly and with knowledge that such loss would probably result".

The limit of liability for property claims for ships not exceeding 2,000 gross tonnage is 1 million SDR.

* For larger ships, the following additional amounts are used in calculating the limitation amount: 

• For each ton from 2,001 to 30,000 tons, 400 SDR 

• For each ton from 30,001 to 70,000 tons, 300 SDR

• For each ton in excess of 70,000, 200 SDR

So that'd be 29,200,000 SDR.

https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/data/rms_sdrv.aspx

1.325610 US dollars per SDR.

So about a $39 million limit on marine liability for a ship of that size, or under 4% of the price of the bridge.

Maybe Baltimore taxpayers are gonna be buying Baltimore a new bridge.

EDIT2: I wonder how owners of larger ships managed to get lower per-ton liability limits than owners of smaller ships.

EDIT3: Oh, wait. Apparently the US isn't party to that treaty. Sounds like the US uses law even more favorable to the shipowner.

https://iclg.com/practice-areas/shipping-laws-and-regulations/usa

The United States is not a party to the 1976 Convention on Limitation of Liability for Maritime Claims.  Instead, the United States continues to apply the Limitation of Liability Act (the Limitation Act), passed in 1851 to encourage investment in shipping.  Under this Act, vessel owners (including demise charterers) may limit liability to the value of the vessel and pending freight in certain circumstances where the loss occurred without the privity or knowledge of the owner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitation_of_Liability_Act_of_1851

The Act was passed by Congress on March 3, 1851 to protect the maritime shipping industry; at the time, shipowners were subject to loss from events beyond their control such as storms and pirates, so the Act was designed to limit the shipowners' liability to the value of the vessel. Without it, American shipping was "at a competitive disadvantage" compared to other maritime countries where similar limitations applied.[1]: 260 

Section 3 of the 1851 Act states "the liability of the owner or owners of any ship or vessel ... shall in no case exceed the amount or value of the interest of such owner or owners respectively, in such ship or vessel, and her freight then pending".

I guess if you're gonna knock down a bridge with a container ship, the US is probably a good place to do it.

“Going forward, it is mandatory in North America to install and activate FSD V12.3.1 and take customers on a short test ride before handing over the car,” Musk wrote in an email to staffers on Monday. “Almost no one actually realizes how well (supervised) FSD actually works. I know this will slow down the delivery process, but it is nonetheless a hard requirement.”

I mean, you can require the employee delivering the car to offer to take the customer on a ride. You can require the employee to tell the customer how awesome the service is. But I don't see how you can make the customer go for a ride if the customer doesn't want to go for a ride. And, frankly, I kind of suspect that a not-inconsiderable number of new customers just want to go use their new car and aren't interested in sitting through a sales pitch for some associated service.

"The president cannot function, and the presidency itself cannot retain its vital independence, if the president faces criminal prosecution for official acts once he leaves office," the filing said.

The presidents from 1789 to 2016 did seem to manage, one way or another.

No flying machine will ever reach New York from Paris.

googles

Interestingly, when he wrote that, it was part of a larger quote saying virtually the same thing that you are, just over a century ago:

Wilbur in the Cairo, Illinois, Bulletin, March 25, 1909

No airship will ever fly from New York to Paris. That seems to me to be impossible. What limits the flight is the motor. No known motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping, and you can’t be sure of finding the proper winds for soaring. The airship will always be a special messenger, never a load-carrier. But the history of civilization has usually shown that every new invention has brought in its train new needs it can satisfy, and so what the airship will eventually be used for is probably what we can least predict at the present.

The Hubble constant seemed determined not to be constant.

I think that the article is kind of blowing the statement a bit out of proportion.

Nobody has ever said that Ukraine -- which is at war -- does not have the legal right to hit targets inside Russia.

The issues are just diplomatic, not legal. Some countries don't want the weapons they supply being used to hit targets in Russia. Ukraine has been hitting targets in Russia for some time with her own weapons.

I don't think that this will change what Ukraine is doing, nor that it represents a change in the diplomatic positions of those countries.

https://www.marketplace.org/2024/01/29/why-credit-card-debt-rising-again/

Another reason credit card debt has been rising is because of the strong job market.

That’s because people with jobs feel comfortable spending money on their credit cards, said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab — a Marketplace underwriter.

Hmm. I would have guessed the opposite -- that you borrow if forced to in an emergency like a job loss, but if you have income, then you don't need to take out debt. Apparently that's not what humans actually do.

I kind of wish that multi-unit housing came with sound isolation ratings. That'd create an incentive to have better isolation and help customers weigh the tradeoffs.

There's a lot of detailing what the author did to try to investigate the issues. That's interesting, but if one just wants what he found, one can skip to the end, which summarizes the results:

So why is Cities: Skylines 2 so incredibly heavy on the GPU? The short answer is that the game is throwing so much unnecessary geometry at the graphics card that the game manages to be largely limited by the available rasterization performance. The cause for unnecessary geometry is both the lack of simplified LOD variants for many of the game’s meshes, as well as the simplistic and seemingly untuned culling implementation. And the reason why the game has its own culling implementation instead of using Unity’s built in solution (which should at least in theory be much more advanced) is because Colossal Order had to implement quite a lot of the graphics side themselves because Unity’s integration between DOTS and HDRP is still very much a work in progress and arguably unsuitable for most actual games. Similarly Unity’s virtual texturing solution remains eternally in beta, so CO had to implement their own solution for that too, which still has some teething issues.

Here’s what I think that happened (a.k.a this is speculation): Colossal Order took a gamble on Unity’s new and shiny tech, and in some ways it paid off massively and in others it caused them a lot of headache. This is not a rare situation in software development and is something I’ve experienced myself as well in my dayjob as a web-leaning developer. They chose DOTS as the architecture to fix the CPU bottlenecks their previous game suffered from and to increase the scale & depth of the simulation, and largely succeeded on that front. CO started the game when DOTS was still experimental, and it probably came as a surprise how much they had to implement themselves even when DOTS was officially considered production ready. I wouldn’t be surprised if they started the game with Entities Graphics but then had to pivot to custom solutions for culling, skeletal animation, texture streaming and so on when they realized Unity’s official solution was not going to cut it. Ultimately the game had to be released too early when these systems were still unpolished, likely due to financial and / or publisher pressure. None of these technical issues were news for the developers on release day, and I don’t believe their claim that the game was intended to target 30 FPS from the beginning — no purebred PC game has done that since the early 2000s, and the graphical fidelity doesn’t justify it.

In even shorter form:

• Highly-detailed models coupled with a lack of lower-level-of-detail models for viewing at a distance.

• Limited culling (avoiding drawing things that aren't actually visible onscreen).

• Some gambles made on external work-in-progress software that turned out not to be ready at release time, forcing the developer to implement their own solutions.

Literally the single prominent technical problem that has spanned Reddit's entire life is the lack of a decent search engine. In general, people fell back to Google because Reddit's was abysmal.

So is Reddit gonna finally build something decent? Because if they don't let Google index them, and they disabled Pushshift access, it's gonna be hard to search the content.

Icelandic developers CCP

Not

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP),

For anyone else who stared at the headline for a moment in confusion.