Ain't technology grand?

[samhexum]

Chinese firm tests electric flying taxi in Dubai

https://www.aol.com/news/chinese-firm-tests-electric-flying-162347884-210535168.html

The XPeng X2, developed by the Guangzhou-based XPeng Inc's aviation affiliate, is one of dozens of flying car projects around the world. Only a handful have been successfully tested with passengers on board, and it will likely be many years before any are put into service.

Monday's demonstration was held with an empty cockpit, but the company says it carried out a manned flight test in July 2021.

Uber & Lyft are really gonna fight it out now...

Edited October 11, 2022 by samhexum
for shits and giggles

[+ WilliamM]

What's wrong with freaking helicopters?

They have been used successfully in wars and many other occasions. I have used them myself.

[samhexum]

For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can’t turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building.

The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”

Osborne said it’s difficult to say how much money it's costing because during the pandemic and in its aftermath, energy costs have fluctuated wildly.

“I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Osborne said.

That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.

Still, having the lights on at Minnechaug all the time is a conspicuous waste of taxpayer money, Wilbraham’s town selectmen said in an Aug. 8, 2022, letter to the members of the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District.

“The image it projects is one of profligacy in a time when many families in the communities the District serves are struggling with their own energy costs,” they wrote.

But there’s hope on the horizon that the lights at Minnechaug will soon be dimmed.

Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break.

“And yes, there will be a remote override switch so this won’t happen again,” said Mustone, whose company has been in business for more than 40 years.

Minnechaug is the only high school in its district and serves 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden. The original high school building, which dates back to 1959, was replaced with the current 248,000-square foot structure in 2012.

One of the cost-saving measures the school board insisted on was a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light to control the lights in the building. The system was designed to save energy — and thus save money — by automatically adjusting the lights as needed.

But in August 2021, staffers at the school noticed that the lights were not dimming in the daytime and burning brightly through the night.

“The lighting system went into default,” said Osborne. “And the default position for the lighting system is for the lights to be on.”

Osborne said they immediately reached out to the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the high school was built. When they finally tracked down the current owner of the company, Reflex Lighting, several more weeks went by before the company was able to find somebody familiar with the high school’s lighting system, he said.

In the meantime, Lilli DiGrande, who is now a 16-year-old junior and a co-editor of The Smoke Signal, the online high school newspaper, published an article on Nov. 3, 2021, with the headline “What’s Wrong With The Lights?”

“The teachers were complaining because they couldn’t dim the lights to show videos and movies on the whiteboard,” DiGrande told NBC News. “The teachers now try to get around it by unscrewing light bulbs. But the lights seem to be on everywhere in the school.”

Soon, Wilbraham’s town selectmen began hearing complaints from residents.

“The Board of Selectmen members have received, and continue to receive, complaints regarding the lights being left on at night at Minnechaug Regional High School,” they wrote in their Aug. 8, 2022, letter. “The lights that are being referred to are the classroom lights, not the outdoor lights. There is a significant amount of concern expressed by citizens that this is a waste of energy and, in turn, taxpayer dollars.”

The town leaders added that “this issue may be one of lesser cost or importance in the overall operation of the District, but it is, unfortunately, a visible one.”

Osborne, along with Schools Superintendent John Provost, assured the town leaders they had been working on the problem.

“After many weeks of effort, we were provided a rough estimate in excess of $1.2 Million to comparably replace the entire system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in an Aug. 26, 2022, response.

That estimate was from Reflex Lighting, Osborne told NBC News.

But with the pandemic raging, the contractor would not have been able to start doing the job until the following summer, Osborne said.

So Osborne and Provost, in their letter to town leaders, wrote that they hired a software consultant to see if it would be possible to “patch the system” to override the default system. And when that proved unworkable, they explored the possibility of having simple timers installed or even an on/off switch.

“This was eventually deemed not possible and the district moved on to looking at physical solutions that would retain some of the energy-saving intent of the original lighting management system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in their response.

Osborne said they had no choice but to go back to Reflex Lighting and, with the help of the company’s electrical engineers, they came up with what he described as a “piecemeal” approach to solving the problem by replacing the server, the lighting control boards and other hardware.

In November 2021, the parts were ordered and the repair job was supposed to start in February 2022.

But the replacement main server wasn’t delivered to Wilbraham until March 2022, which Osborne and Provost described in their letter to town leaders as “relatively on schedule.”

“It was very frustrating, but we were dealing with the pandemic and supply chain issues,” Osborne said.

Osborne and Provost also reported that “the remaining equipment has been back ordered multiple times” and the district was given a new delivery date of Oct. 14, 2022.

“While we are hopeful this will be met, we are of course skeptical,” they wrote. “So, for now, the lights are stuck on.”

It turned out they were right to be skeptical.

The Christmas 2022 season came and went and the replacement parts were not delivered and the lights remained on at Minnechaug.

“The final lighting system transition did not happen over break as expected because our vendor contacted us on the last day school was in session to reschedule the transition work,” Osborne said in a subsequent Jan. 3 letter to the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee. “This was surprising and disappointing to us: we had this date locked with Reflex since October.”

Now, Osborne said, “we’re not expecting them to come until February, but we are pushing to do it sooner.”

But he's confident that waiting it out was the right decision.

“We could have accepted the $1.2 million bid to rip the system out and start over right away, but I suspect we would find ourselves in the same position,” he said. “As I see it, there wasn’t an alternative.”

Mustone said the pandemic essentially shut down the factories in China that produce the components they need to do this kind of work. He said it’s a lot cheaper to build things over there, but lots of American companies like his are now paying the price.

“I have been doing this for 42 years and I have never seen this kind of supply chain disruption,” he said. “We made a deal with the devil by moving the factories to China.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lights-massachusetts-school-year-no-one-can-turn-rcna65611

I can hear Vicki Lawrence singing... That's the years that the lights stayed on at Minnechaug...

[samhexum]

Jimmy Kimmel interviews himself from 20 years ago:

 

Edited January 28, 2023 by samhexum
for shits and giggles

[samhexum]

A pet fish did some online shopping and shared its owner’s credit card information while playing a video game, according to reports.

Japanese YouTuber Mutekimaru, aka Maurice, runs a channel that features his Siamese fighting fish, or betta, playing Pokémon video games on a Nintendo Switch gaming console.

A malfunction during a recent game of Pokémon Violet, however, returned the device to its home screen. Due to movements the fish made, the fish was able to open the Nintendo eShop on the screen and spend $4 of Maurice’s money to purchase points. 

The spendthrift pet also exposed its owner’s credit card information on a livestream.

And he didn’t stop there.

The fish went on to somehow download an app, spend reward money on a new avatar and ask the online payment company PayPal for a confirmation email.

The little swimmer also managed to change Maurice’s account name from “Mutekimaru” to “ROWAWAWAWA.”

Mutekimaru’s channel first caught the attention of gamers in the summer of 2020 by featuring videos of betta fish in video game competitions.

Their tank is divided into different sections that are designated as the Left, Right, Up, Down, A and B buttons of a game controller. To capture the animals’ movements, a webcam is set up nearby.

During play sessions, a total of four fish rotate every 12 hours to allow each to get some much-needed time to recharge.

In 2020, one of the fish made headlines when it dethroned the reigning Pokémon Sapphire champion after more than 3,000 hours of continuous playtime. Another was able to uncover a game glitch that humans hadn’t discovered in 18 years.

I'd imagine that the call to customer service to get the charge reversed might have been a first for the employee.

https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/youtuber-mutekimaru-baffles-internet-by-having-fish-play-pokemon/

[samhexum]

A new self-parking garage operated by artificial intelligence (AI) has opened in the Ditmars section of Astoria — the first of its kind in the borough, according to its operators.

The garage, which has 96 car spaces, is located at The Rowan, a newly developed mixed-use condominium building at 21-21 31st St.

Drivers can park their vehicle on the ground floor of the garage, and then an automated moving platform takes it underground and positions it into a car space.

The artificial intelligence component of the system analyzes customer driving habits such as what time they typically pick up their vehicle on a given day.

The AI then instructs the system to move the vehicle to the front of the line so that when customers return to the garage, their cars will be faster to retrieve, according to RockFarmer Properties, the Little Neck-based developer behind The Rowan.

The high-tech garage also saves time for drivers in other ways since they don’t need to find a vacant space themselves, while it also means that more vehicles can be packed into the garage compared to regular garages.

“The future of parking has arrived in Queens,” said John Petras, the co-founder of RockFarmer Properties. “As a developer, I think the automated system is a game-changer.”

Petras said the design of the garage, coupled with its AI system, allowed RockFarmer to create an extra 50 vehicle spaces and increase retail space size at the property.

“It’s a huge advantage to know you can drive to your doctor’s appointment or shop for groceries without having to worry about public transportation or paying for a taxi. We are excited to see how the system changes people’s habits; it really revolutionizes parking.”

Petras also said that vehicles are also safe from being dented or hit by other vehicles since they are all assigned an exclusive platform and are not driven by anyone. The AI system is designed by U-tron, a New Jersey-based parking solutions company.

Drivers park their vehicles on a platform in the parking bay, where the car is then automatically scanned and measured to determine its size and shape.

The vehicle is then transferred via the platform to its designated parking space via an automated lift.

Drivers then use an app or an electronic ticket system at a kiosk to request and retrieve their vehicle. The automated mechanism then returns the car to one of two parking bays at the garage. The bays are located at the rear of The Rowan.

The garage is open 24/7 and comes with round-the-clock video surveillance while vehicles are also safeguarded from elements, such as snow, rain, wind and extreme temperatures, Petras said. The automated system means that less fuel is also used during parking, he said.

GGMC Parking, a Manhattan-based parking garage provider, is managing and operating the automated garage. The company has more than 20 locations throughout the city.

GGMC Parking is offering a special introductory rate of $149.00 on all monthly contracts signed through May 31. For more information, call (929) 349-6515 or email TheRowan@GGMCParking.com.

https://astoriapost.com/artificial-intelligence-ai-parking-garage-opens-in-astoria-first-of-its-kind-in-queens

 

 

[samhexum]

[samhexum]

POSTED ON ANOTHER SITE:

I read a fascinating article today about how to store electricity generated by solar and wind, since those often generate more electricity than needed when active and yet make none when the sun goes down or the wind quits blowing. It is to created storage “lakes” at different topographic heights. The technology, which is tried and true, is to use the excess electricity to pump water into the higher lake, and then when the electricity sources stop producing, to allow the water to fall through hydroelectric turbines into the lower lake, where the water will be stored until the solar and/or wind sources kick on again, and the cycle can repeat endlessly. There might be need to replenish the water occasionally, but the idea is to figure out ways to reduce evaporation of the water to minimize those losses. It claimed that even a relatively small lake could produce enough electricity this way to power a city of 1 million homes. It would be a bit tricky in a place like the midwest which is so flat, but I think even a 200 foot difference in elevation would be sufficient to create this double-lake “battery”.

[mike carey]

24 minutes ago, samhexum said:

POSTED ON ANOTHER SITE:

I read a fascinating article today about how to store electricity generated by solar and wind, since those often generate more electricity than needed when active and yet make none when the sun goes down or the wind quits blowing. It is to created storage “lakes” at different topographic heights. The technology, which is tried and true, is to use the excess electricity to pump water into the higher lake, and then when the electricity sources stop producing, to allow the water to fall through hydroelectric turbines into the lower lake, where the water will be stored until the solar and/or wind sources kick on again, and the cycle can repeat endlessly. There might be need to replenish the water occasionally, but the idea is to figure out ways to reduce evaporation of the water to minimize those losses. It claimed that even a relatively small lake could produce enough electricity this way to power a city of 1 million homes. It would be a bit tricky in a place like the midwest which is so flat, but I think even a 200 foot difference in elevation would be sufficient to create this double-lake “battery”.

Pumped hydro! Who knew such a thing existed??

[samhexum]

Pennsylvania will truck in 2,000 tons of lightweight glass nuggets to help quickly rebuild a collapsed section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia and crews will work 24 hours a day until they can reopen the critical commercial artery, officials said Wednesday.

Instead of rebuilding the overpass right away, crews will use the recycled glass to fill in the collapsed area to avoid supply-chain delays for other materials, Gov. Josh Shapiro said.

But Shapiro repeatedly declined to estimate how long it will take to get traffic flowing again on the busy East Coast highway.

“We’re going to get this job done as quickly as possible,” Shapiro said at a news conference near the site, over the sounds of heavy machinery working to clear wreckage. He said the work would be done with union labor.

Investigators continued to look into why a truck hauling gasoline went out of control on an off-ramp and flipped on its side, igniting a fire early Sunday that caused the collapse of the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 and severely damaged the southbound lanes.

Workers will fill the gap — which is roughly 100 feet (30 meters) long and 150 feet wide — by piling recycled foam glass aggregate into the underpass area, bringing it up to surface level and then paving it over so that three lanes of traffic can reopen each way, Shapiro said.

“This approach will allow us to avoid delays due to shipping and supply chain issues and pursue a simple, quicker path,” Shapiro said.

After that, a replacement bridge will be built next to it to reroute traffic while crews excavate the fill to restore the exit ramp, officials said.

The Biden administration is pledging its aid as the collapse snarls traffic in Philadelphia while the summer travel season starts. It has upended hundreds of thousands of morning commutes, disrupted countless businesses and forced trucking companies to find different routes.

Demolition of both the northbound and southbound lanes in the overpass was expected to finish Thursday. Trucks hauling glass aggregate could start arriving the same day and will have a state police escort, officials said.

The company supplying the glass aggregate, AeroAggregates of North America, has a production site just south of Philadelphia along the Delaware River. There, it mills glass bottles and jars diverted from landfills into a powder and heats it into a foam to produce small, lightweight nuggets that are gray and look like rocks — but are as light as Styrofoam, said CEO Archie Filshill.

Each one is about an inch or inch-and-a-half wide.

Filshill estimated that it will take about 100 box-truck loads to haul about 10,000 cubic yards (7,600 cubic meters) of the glass nuggets required for the I-95 project. The total weight is around 2,000 tons, a fraction of the weight of regular sand or dirt, meaning that it will take many fewer trucks to bring it to the site, Filshill said.

PennDOT was the first to use his company's product after he began making it in 2017, and it is now approved for use by 23 state transportation departments around the country, Filshill said. AeroAggregates will divert material bound for other, less urgent projects to the I-95 project, he said.

The disruption is likely raise the cost of consumer goods because truckers must now travel longer routes, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said.

Of the 160,000 vehicles a day that travel that section, 8% are trucks, Buttigieg said.

Police say the driver died in the accident. The Philadelphia medical examiner identified him as Nathan Moody, 53.

Authorities say Moody was headed northbound on his way to deliver fuel to a convenience store when the truck lost control on a curving off-ramp, landing on its side and rupturing the tank.

https://www.aol.com/news/pennsylvania-plans-fix-collapsed-section-144416983.html

to continue pounding the pavement theme...

Representatives from city agencies gathered together in Rockaway Park on Tuesday, June 13, for a ribbon-cutting ceremony to announce the completion of the $16.6 million infrastructure project dedicated to rebuilding the peninsula’s Beach 108th Street. 

Among the block’s newest features is 11,000 square feet of new permeable concrete slabs, also referred to as “porous pavement,” designed for better drainage into the ground below. The ceremony included a demonstration of the porous pavement’s draining abilities, as workers from the Department of Environmental Protection poured water onto the concrete from a nearby hydrant.

Beach 108th Street was one of many blocks on the Rockaway peninsula that suffered damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, contributing to the large size of the rebuilding project. As a result, the Department of Environmental Protection’s Unified Stormwater Rule, which took effect in 2022, required the use of Green Infrastructure in the project. The department will also require this for other similar projects citywide. 

“We’re going to be doing this everywhere, not just here in Rockaway so it’s an important step forward,” said Department of Environmental Protection Chief Operating Officer Vincent Sapienza. “We really need to make our surfaces more permeable so that they soak up that rainfall.”

The city estimates that the addition of porous pavement to Beach 108th Street will allow the block to absorb and drain approximately 1.3 million gallons of stormwater into the ground annually. The repairing of approximately 1,100 feet of existing storm sewers and 22 catch basins, as well as the addition of 140 feet of new storm sewers and three new catch basins, will help support the excess water drainage. The project also replaced about 6,000 feet of old water mains and added two new fire hydrants.

https://qns.com/2023/06/porous-pavement-reconstruction-project/

Edited June 15, 2023 by samhexum
just for the hell of it

[samhexum]

On 3/23/2023 at 5:32 PM, samhexum said:

A new self-parking garage operated by artificial intelligence (AI) has opened in the Ditmars section of Astoria — the first of its kind in the borough, according to its operators.

[samhexum]

On 6/15/2023 at 10:57 AM, samhexum said:

Pennsylvania will truck in 2,000 tons of lightweight glass nuggets to help quickly rebuild a collapsed section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia and crews will work 24 hours a day until they can reopen the critical commercial artery, officials said Wednesday.

Instead of rebuilding the overpass right away, crews will use the recycled glass to fill in the collapsed area to avoid supply-chain delays for other materials, Gov. Josh Shapiro said.

But Shapiro repeatedly declined to estimate how long it will take to get traffic flowing again on the busy East Coast highway.

“We’re going to get this job done as quickly as possible,” Shapiro said at a news conference near the site.

• First vehicles cross newly constructed I-95 bridge that collapsed from deadly tanker fire

•  

[samhexum]

[samhexum]

[samhexum]

Michigan thief used Bluetooth to steal 800 gallons of gas by hacking into pumps

[samhexum]

[samhexum]

[+ WilliamM]

Way too much information 

[samhexum]

[samhexum]

[samhexum]

Edited February 14 by samhexum
for absolutely NO @%!*ING reason at all!

[samhexum]

[+ WilliamM]

On 1/19/2023 at 3:08 PM, samhexum said:

For nearly a year and a half, a Massachusetts high school has been lit up around the clock because the district can’t turn off the roughly 7,000 lights in the sprawling building.

The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” Aaron Osborne, the assistant superintendent of finance at the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, told NBC News. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”

Osborne said it’s difficult to say how much money it's costing because during the pandemic and in its aftermath, energy costs have fluctuated wildly.

“I would say the net impact is in the thousands of dollars per month on average, but not in the tens of thousands,” Osborne said.

That, in part, is because the high school uses highly efficient fluorescent and LED bulbs, he said. And, when possible, teachers have manually removed bulbs from fixtures in classrooms while staffers have shut off breakers not connected to the main system to douse some of the exterior lights.

Still, having the lights on at Minnechaug all the time is a conspicuous waste of taxpayer money, Wilbraham’s town selectmen said in an Aug. 8, 2022, letter to the members of the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District.

“The image it projects is one of profligacy in a time when many families in the communities the District serves are struggling with their own energy costs,” they wrote.

But there’s hope on the horizon that the lights at Minnechaug will soon be dimmed.

Paul Mustone, president of the Reflex Lighting Group, said the parts they need to replace the system at the school have finally arrived from the factory in China and they expect to do the installation over the February break.

“And yes, there will be a remote override switch so this won’t happen again,” said Mustone, whose company has been in business for more than 40 years.

Minnechaug is the only high school in its district and serves 1,200 students from the towns of Wilbraham and Hampden. The original high school building, which dates back to 1959, was replaced with the current 248,000-square foot structure in 2012.

One of the cost-saving measures the school board insisted on was a “green lighting system” run on software installed by a company called 5th Light to control the lights in the building. The system was designed to save energy — and thus save money — by automatically adjusting the lights as needed.

But in August 2021, staffers at the school noticed that the lights were not dimming in the daytime and burning brightly through the night.

“The lighting system went into default,” said Osborne. “And the default position for the lighting system is for the lights to be on.”

Osborne said they immediately reached out to the original installer of the system only to discover that the company had changed hands several times since the high school was built. When they finally tracked down the current owner of the company, Reflex Lighting, several more weeks went by before the company was able to find somebody familiar with the high school’s lighting system, he said.

In the meantime, Lilli DiGrande, who is now a 16-year-old junior and a co-editor of The Smoke Signal, the online high school newspaper, published an article on Nov. 3, 2021, with the headline “What’s Wrong With The Lights?”

“The teachers were complaining because they couldn’t dim the lights to show videos and movies on the whiteboard,” DiGrande told NBC News. “The teachers now try to get around it by unscrewing light bulbs. But the lights seem to be on everywhere in the school.”

Soon, Wilbraham’s town selectmen began hearing complaints from residents.

“The Board of Selectmen members have received, and continue to receive, complaints regarding the lights being left on at night at Minnechaug Regional High School,” they wrote in their Aug. 8, 2022, letter. “The lights that are being referred to are the classroom lights, not the outdoor lights. There is a significant amount of concern expressed by citizens that this is a waste of energy and, in turn, taxpayer dollars.”

The town leaders added that “this issue may be one of lesser cost or importance in the overall operation of the District, but it is, unfortunately, a visible one.”

Osborne, along with Schools Superintendent John Provost, assured the town leaders they had been working on the problem.

“After many weeks of effort, we were provided a rough estimate in excess of $1.2 Million to comparably replace the entire system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in an Aug. 26, 2022, response.

That estimate was from Reflex Lighting, Osborne told NBC News.

But with the pandemic raging, the contractor would not have been able to start doing the job until the following summer, Osborne said.

So Osborne and Provost, in their letter to town leaders, wrote that they hired a software consultant to see if it would be possible to “patch the system” to override the default system. And when that proved unworkable, they explored the possibility of having simple timers installed or even an on/off switch.

“This was eventually deemed not possible and the district moved on to looking at physical solutions that would retain some of the energy-saving intent of the original lighting management system,” Osborne and Provost wrote in their response.

Osborne said they had no choice but to go back to Reflex Lighting and, with the help of the company’s electrical engineers, they came up with what he described as a “piecemeal” approach to solving the problem by replacing the server, the lighting control boards and other hardware.

In November 2021, the parts were ordered and the repair job was supposed to start in February 2022.

But the replacement main server wasn’t delivered to Wilbraham until March 2022, which Osborne and Provost described in their letter to town leaders as “relatively on schedule.”

“It was very frustrating, but we were dealing with the pandemic and supply chain issues,” Osborne said.

Osborne and Provost also reported that “the remaining equipment has been back ordered multiple times” and the district was given a new delivery date of Oct. 14, 2022.

“While we are hopeful this will be met, we are of course skeptical,” they wrote. “So, for now, the lights are stuck on.”

It turned out they were right to be skeptical.

The Christmas 2022 season came and went and the replacement parts were not delivered and the lights remained on at Minnechaug.

“The final lighting system transition did not happen over break as expected because our vendor contacted us on the last day school was in session to reschedule the transition work,” Osborne said in a subsequent Jan. 3 letter to the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School Committee. “This was surprising and disappointing to us: we had this date locked with Reflex since October.”

Now, Osborne said, “we’re not expecting them to come until February, but we are pushing to do it sooner.”

But he's confident that waiting it out was the right decision.

“We could have accepted the $1.2 million bid to rip the system out and start over right away, but I suspect we would find ourselves in the same position,” he said. “As I see it, there wasn’t an alternative.”

Mustone said the pandemic essentially shut down the factories in China that produce the components they need to do this kind of work. He said it’s a lot cheaper to build things over there, but lots of American companies like his are now paying the price.

“I have been doing this for 42 years and I have never seen this kind of supply chain disruption,” he said. “We made a deal with the devil by moving the factories to China.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/lights-massachusetts-school-year-no-one-can-turn-rcna65611

I can hear Vicki Lawrence singing... That's the years that the lights stayed on at Minnechaug...

I grew up in Massachusetts.

This regional school is in West Massachusetts.

Regional schools in Massachusetts don't do well.

I lived in Framingham, Massachusetts and drove to Boston College for four years, including the day John Kennedy was assassinated