The TiO2 will likely rub off and need regular replenishment. Also, the alternative here, sensor-operated or button-operated automatic doors are already widely used. I wonder who this is meant for?

This is probably easier to install or retrofit than an automatic door, seeing as it self powers

Motion sensors and push plates aren't perfect, but they remove the contact vector entirely instead of trying to mitigate it after the fact

When I was young and having access to internet (but pre social media) I loved looking into these theories, prompted by Discovery Channel's "Quest for the lost civilization" and stumbling upon these books from the 1970s. It felt like doing research and archaeology on the nascent internet.

I was surprised to see these ideas becoming so mainstream with Ancient Aliens, and then somehow finding overlap with the alt-right, antivax and Covid-doubters. This made me really turn off of taking this seriously.

It would be amazing if they could leverage the container system, but instead of goods, there'd be battery containers they could just plug in to the ship. You could even charge a battery container somewhere and bring it in by (electrified) rail.

If we ever end up doing that it would mean terrible things for the state of our regulatory landscape.

A completely optimized high capacity cargo rail line can move 500 rail cars per hour. That's 1000 FEUs if we double stack containers. A lithium battery system in a FEU has around 2 MWh of storage. So that rail line has 2 GW transmission capacity if we saturate it with batteries - the same as a single high voltage transmission line. Being unable to build one of those in parallel to the rail line would be extremely sad.

Note that 500 rail cars per hour is actually an impressive feat of logistics. A normal rail yard at a port would be very happy with a sustained rate of 200 rail cars per hour, and will frequently drop below that.

Incredible teamwork: OOP dismantles society in paragraph form, and OP proudly outsources his interpretation to an LLM.. If this isn’t collective self-parody, I don’t know what it is.

No it's actually implicitly endorsing the authoritarian ethos. Neo-Marxists were occasionally authoritarian leaning but are more appropriately categorized along other axes.

Reading the blog post the Marxist sentiment was creeping in, and then I also saw actual Marx referenced in the footnotes.

Without spoiling too much, this is a major theme in Dan Brown's latest novel 'the secret of secrets'.

Hmm is it worth the read? edit: coming from someone who overall was mildly fond of Angels and Demons and would consider that as the bar for worthwhile reading

I added it to my reading list!

Northern Europe had a very similar facility, a large "underground city" in The Netherlands near Maastricht, being used as a command center / information hub in NATO for the airspace. Unfortunately in the construction was a lot of asbestos, and it was completely dismantled. Small tours are given by former employees though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORTHAG_War_Headquarters_Canne...

There's quite a few extensive underground structures scattered around the UK too that were built to defend against Soviet bombers, some of them started life as part of the original Chain Home system from the Second World War and were reactivated as part of the ROTOR programme in the 1950s. Some had a very short life as radar technology quickly improved, leading to many sites being abandoned while some became regional headquarters for dealing with civil emergencies. They're characterised by a specific design of bungalow which conceals a staircase down to a long, sloping corridor into the bunker system below.

A few are preserved today as Cold War museums, but most are sealed off and occasionally become high-value locations for British urbexers on the odd occasion access becomes available. Historically there was a subculture around exploring such places and documenting them for posterity, but YouTube kind of ruined it by making interesting abandoned sites magnets for vandals and attention-seekers which is the last thing you want in those places.

The ROTOR bunkers would take a braver man than me to explore though, they're often burned out, flooded, and full of asbestos with all the interesting 1950s tech long removed. Not to mention they're often located on farmland where the landowners are fed up of said YouTube crowd traipsing around.

There really are too few business models available to build sustainable IoT solutions, apart from subscriptions (and only Security companies seem to have figured this out), pyramid schemes (letting your new users pay for maintaining the whole solution), or plain old planned obsolescence (with forced upgrades, like with Smartphones).

I'm not sure what models would work, apart from regulators stepping in and mandating x years of updates, like with the European regulations. Which basically comes down to #3.

Folks in corporate thought users would just love a garbage spyware app that reproduces functionality already available under the various home automation platforms - but with extra steps and pointless online requirements.

Then corporate finally realises that years of "user 000128571 locked door" log files are worth precisely f'all to advertisers.

Studying a building's microbiome is really a new field. What happens to people if offices become boxes of sterile air and -surfaces? We don't know.

You are correct, however most of the harmful rays get filtered out in the upper atmosphere. Far-UV doesn't reach Earth, only UV-A and small amounts of UV-B (if the ozone layer is more or less intact that is!).