Smart grid.
Right now there are multiple construction equipment rental facilities in my city. They all seem to have a row of quarter megawatt class towable generators ready for rental.
They sit on a gravel parking lot and do absolutely nothing during an outage.
Theoretically, if you fired up every unrented construction gen plus every stand by power generator at every large building, I think you could, in a distributed sense, temporarily generate several megawatts, maybe more than ten MW, in my home town.
Yes it would be very expensive per KWH and eventually you'd run out of diesel, but for a couple days it would work.
No wiring currently exists and no control systems exist although in theory this isn't any "worse", and probably a lot better, than having a couple MW of intermittent solar capacity.
We will probably never get away from needing heavy construction equipment and needing backup generators so those will "probably" always be available in perpetuity. Maybe they'll switch from diesel to biodiesel, but it'll be the same idea.
FWIW a quarter megawatt towable generator is smaller than you'd think, like 12 foot long trailer, MUCH smaller than a RV, if they were not all painted up as rental generators you'd think they're "landscaper trailers". They are HEAVY and take a dualie truck to tow, like "ten thousand pounds" with full tanks and very long and very large electrical cables, etc. A row of ten of them in a parking lot is not overly impressive looking until you realize that's 2.5 megawatts on tap, and these are industrial rated so they are designed to run full power 24x7 in the worst weather conditions.
A year around long term average estimate is maybe 1.5 KW continuous per house so perhaps they could only run maybe ten thousand homes if they shut down every non-essential business and fired up every generator. However my city only has 30K homes so dropping demand by 1/3 would be "pretty helpful" for renewables if they can't quite keep up.
If I owned an EV I would be happy to charge it down the road at 15 cents/KWh (towards the high end for my state) and discharge it into a failing grid for maybe $1.50 KWh, if I could get the cycle time down to an hour (very optimistic...) and I moved 100 KWh each time, I could make nearly $150/hr as an "electricity tank driver". Realistically I think a failing grid would bid up prices well over $1.50 so I think this quite reasonable... if every charger could be upgraded to backfeed into the grid then a fleet of EVs would be a huge source of mobile power.
The big problem with the cost of nuclear facilities is its military-aerospace style where the cost merely coincidentally happens to be absolute maximum they can spend. There's no competition or standardization, just we'll take all your money. Like telling a car mechanic how much money is in your wallet before asking how much it'll cost to fix your car then acting surprised when the numbers are about equal. Real estate agents operate the same way.
The article in detail danced around a couple socioeconomic issues:
People had vastly higher standards of living in the good old days. A working guy in a factory could buy a house on a cheap small mortgage, have a new car, pay for a stay at home wife and a bunch of kids, and, yes, buy fancy clothes almost recreationally, and anyone higher up had an even better lifestyle, of course my grandfather had a cottage on a lake for the summer, just like everyone else in his socioeconomic group ("management"). The fancy clothes go well with the nice house and new car that even relatively poor people could afford... back in the old days. People are much, much poorer now, much more hand to mouth, if that. Long term socioeconomic decline. I'm sure Rome after the fall of Rome was not quite as stylish as Rome at the peak of the Empire, and now its our turn for steep permanent decline and all that results from it.
Profit must be maximized at all costs explaining why designer clothes are so boring. If you are in the business of buying nice fancy attractive imported shirts for $10 and marketing them for $250, you're more or less legally obligated to buy the cheaper more boring looking shirts for $5 and market them for the same $250. And this trickles down to lower financial levels. So no more fancy multi-part button down shirts with elaborate buttons and collars and shaping, you get the cheap rumpled looking tee shirt with the expensive label.
People in general are statistically very fat and fat people have ... unusual, generally inaccurate, very optimistic ideas about what makes them look thinner, like skin tight clothes so they're still a size "large" despite looking very overstuffed. And due to mass marketing everyone has to wear the same style so as a thin athletic guy I have to dress like how a 300 pound guy inaccurately thinks makes him look thinner. If I shop at Target or Old Navy or something like that, I look like a thin guy in a scarecrow stuffed with straw costume. Fat people clothes are NOT flattering on thin people; ironically they're also not even flattering on fat people. But in 2025 everyone has to dress the same and everyone has to dress like them.
Racial vs socioeconomic status signaling. In the old days if you were not a manual laborer you'd dress fancy to make a visual point of not being a manual laborer. Now we have racial profiling where if you're not obviously an illegal you're clearly not a manual laborer, so there's no need to dress up like a factory owner to make it clear you're not a factory worker. I, and people like me, don't need to dress up for people to assume I'm not a groundskeeper on sight. You're judged based on your demographics much more intensely in 2025 than in 1955. All people need to know is my obvious visual demographics and my postal address and where I hang out, they don't need to look at the quality of my clothes, to have an accurate idea what socioeconomic class I'm in. No need to count the pleats in my pants or measure the starched width of my collar.
So, basically, everything is downstream of slow long term economic collapse, profit taking, normalization of fatness, and multiculturalism.
> People had vastly higher standards of living in the good old days.
As a percentage of spending on groceries, people used to spend 25% and now it's 10%; for clothing it used to be 10%, now it's 3%. In 1900 people used to spend over 40% of their budget on food:
Compare the Mustang (and Charger) in the 1968 movie Bullitt compared to today: more horsepower, more torque, better fuel mileage, better safety and comfort (air conditioning!).
Socioeconomic class issue to assume attractive clothes are "scorching" in the summer. They are not.
If your family can only afford one buttondown shirt, one tie, and one pair of nice pants you buy the winter weight because its far more durable (will last years or decades) and you will SWEAT in the summer.
If you can afford summer weight stuff, I own plenty of silky light button down shirts that are far more comfortable and flattering to my body than a thick heavy soggy cotton graphics art lower class tee shirt.
Staying "cool" used to mean being rich, or rich enough to own finer fabrics.
There is also a long term generational shift from people were thin and aspired to look good in "thin" clothes, to people are fat and aspire to look good in "thin" clothes, to now people are fat and don't even bother making an effort anymore. Or putting in any effort at all (clean, no holes, not smelly) that puts them in a high enough class that going even fancier is wasted effort if they already look better than 99% of people they'll run into.
"pass 300,000 people a day"
This strikes me as implausible because it implies 208 cars per minute, 24x7
The picture looks like a driveway, and my local interstate has 75K cars/day at 65 MPH and takes 4 lanes and they're pondering making it a 6 lane due to massive congestion due to economic and population growth in the area. I'm looking forward to saving a lot of time after they build the 6 lane.
I would theorize this is merely an on-ramp to a road network that overall passes 300K. It might be adequate for that if its just a few thousand cars per day.
I'm also impressed they can carry 300K people/day on a $2.3M bridge. Not unusual to blow half a billion per mile on a reconstruction project for a large wide interstate in the USA. $2M will get you roughly a small freeway overpass in the USA. The picture in the article looks more like an overpass or onramp than a mainline bridge. A new, long, wide, heavy weight limit mainline bridge over a large river can exceed a quarter billion in the USA. Its possible they're clickbaiting calling a mere onramp a "bridge" as if they're replicating the florida keys LOL.
Traffic in India is a different beast. Your calculation assumes each person is in a separate car, but that is not common. Many people travel on motorcycles or mopeds, often with multiple people on each. Motorized 3-wheel rickshaws are common. There are buses, cars (often with multiple people per car), etc.
Milwaukee has a predominantly W-E interstate I-94, and when it hits Lake Michigan it simply turns 90 degrees, fairly sharply, to the south, and gets renamed to 794.
Confusingly, there is also a I-94 that also turns south a few thousand feet west of 794, and I94 and 794 run in parallel for several miles.
Note that only I-94 goes to Chicago; 794 just kind of "stops" at the Milwaukee airport.
If you'd like to see the cancelled "Lake Freeway" you can see parts of the partially constructed abandoned project in the movie "The Blues Brothers" from 1980. There is a long history of turmoil in the story of the "Lake Freeway" in Milwaukee, which seems to have dramatically negatively impacted the economic success of the local area due to generational uncertainty. Its a very poor city and their anti-poverty strategy seems to be periodic infrastructure demolition and reconstruction; it hasn't worked so far but they've only been trying that since WWII so maybe it'll work next time ...
(edit: to summarize, if you're trying to get to Chicago from the NW via I-94, if you end up on 794, you are very lost, but at least you've visited a VERY controversial construction project)
Three issues that are important but nobody wants to discuss (why?):
Inflation in the cost of law enforcement. As an X-er I received some truly epic paint-peeling flame-throwing "angry dad-style" lectures from cops and one time I got caught and my parents were called and I paid a municipal citation (not a misdemeanor or felony) equivalent to thirteen hours of minimum wage labor (essentially, one teenage afterschool weekly paycheck...). Now a days it would be kinder if the cops just shot the kid, as they will lose their license semi-permanently which means no job and no programmed activities and no sports, forbidden from joining the military (note the GI Bill paid for my college), lose their security clearance if they are already in the .mil, expelled from college / retract admission, suspended from school, that means no college diploma, no diploma as a job ticket to get one of the very few remaining "good jobs" etc. Seems a little inflated of a punishment over "a couple beers" People like discussing the inflation rate of real estate, lack of inflation in wages, but they should discuss inflation in the punishment for having a few drinks. A general cultural trend toward absolutism where everything thats permitted is mandatory and everything thats not permitted has no limit to the resulting punishment to prevent it. Toe the line precisely, or suffer the full weight of the law, and the line does not include partying, so you'd be crazy to do that.
"In the old days" the cultural expectation was everyone works 9-5. No one is allowed that anymore, they either work 24x7 as servants on call to their feudalistic owner, or have weird hours and gig economy jobs. Most people cannot "drop by after work around 6 for a beer". Can you drink at work? I can't. Can you go to work drunk? I can't. Some people, maybe most people, are not allowed to ever be "not at work". You're not even allowed to sleep if your boss feels like texting you; you surely can't get drunk at a friends house without getting fired. Don't worry that beer (or ten) will only cost you a one year job search to get a new job. When everyone is under house arrest by their employer, nobody parties.
There's a long tradition in the USA of trashing a proper name and the following generation abandons it while doing the same thing under a new name. Every generation before gen-x loved going to malls, then a long indoctrination campaign to use security forces and police to "keep those annoying teenage kids out of malls" started in the 1980s, and here I am in the 2020s and I STILL will not go to the mall because of heavy handed security, and my generation and younger is killing the malls because malls hate me because I was once a teen that hung out at the mall a lifetime ago. So, WRT parties, post "Animal House" movie era, a party means vandalism, drunk driving accidents, police arrests, visiting the ER for alcohol (or other) intoxication, etc. The marketing has been successful and my generation and younger no longer "attend parties". We "hike at the park" or "tailgate at the (kids?) sport event" or "hang out at the festival" or "board game night" doing EXACTLY what we did when people partied, but for marketing reasons we never party anymore, its a "tailgate" sporting event. This makes the article pretty weak sauce, an entire article about doing search and replace in a word processor for "party" and "board game night" is not a significant lifestyle change.
According to the US Census Bureau, the median house age in the usa is 1980.
I live in a 1960 house of the type that is supposedly illegal, although every house in my suburb built since then has had building codes and planning regulations forcing walkability.
Cars are forced for specialization. I had a 20 mile each way commute to an absolutely horrible neighborhood but a very high paying job. I am in walking distance of some minimum wage manual labor jobs. I can't afford to work at those minimum wage manual labor jobs and live here, and a car is incredibly cheap compared to my higher income.
No one can explain why an architectural movement peaking in 1950s-1970s had no effect on socialization for decades until the smartphone era. Multiple entire generations lived in "soulless car filled suburbs" and socialized wildly according to the data in the article... until smartphones...
There's an entire mythology built around the idea that any new problem that occurs began coincidentally with the construction of suburbs in the 1950s, even if the new problem didn't appear for the first 75 years of suburban living.
Its the wrong statistical analysis of the situation.
The death rate does not even remotely depend on infection source IIRC.
Last stat I saw (from some years ago) was in excess of 96.7% of the population had blood antibodies for covid.
You are going to catch covid, your only decision is when and what you can do WRT personal health to lower the risk (aside from "do not be old" there's "do not be fat" "do not be out of shape WRT cardio" etc)
If your local hospital is swamped with cases it would be irresponsible to throw a rager and infect 100 people, at that moment.
If your local hospital is empty and all the nurses are doing at work is posting tiktok dances for karma upvotes, and the odds of catching it eventually are 97%, you may as well have a good time; if you're going to get just as sick regardless if you have fun getting there or not.
Almost all of the "lockdown time" was the latter not the former and only something approaching a civil rebellion ended the latter era. If it were not for that we would still be locked down today in 2025.
The situation is not at all even remotely like smoking where not smoking means you're probably not going to get lung cancer. You are getting covid, and you have minimal but not zero control over when, if now is not a bad time, don't worry, if now is a bad time, out of an abundance of caution you might want to slow (not eliminate) the spread.
You're getting it eventually, you can either be brave and happy and social on the way... or the opposite. A lot of people chose the latter.
and its numerous replacements and "improvements".