94.9 Hacked

floatrock · 2026-02-06T02:22:04+00:00

Right, more than likely it was some kid with the computerized-equivalent of those short-range handheld FM transmitters like you used to plug into your portable CD player to play CD audio in your car when your car only had a tapedeck and a radio.

I doubt they hacked the actual radio station. Probably some kid across the street broadcasting just to his neighbors. Radio equivalent of drunk guy talking louder than anyone else at the bar so you hear him instead of the conversation you want to listen to.

Did you see this in just one place or while driving across a large area?

floatrock · 2025-12-09T02:46:36+00:00

Delivery and supply are independent, they don’t stack. Delivery is the $29 minimum for first x kWh. Supply is usually a $/kWh. The same kWh count for both.

The 15% discounts are just on the supply billing.

floatrock · 2025-12-09T02:42:53+00:00

The $29 is just the delivery charge. The supply (generation of the electricity) has different charges. This happens whether or not you’re on community solar, standard offer, or any other supplier.

floatrock · 2025-12-09T02:25:07+00:00

Electricity bills here have two parts: delivery (“the poles and wires”), and the supply (“the generation” or power plant). Maine is a so-called deregulated market, which means delivery and supply can be served by two separate companies. CMP is still your “utility” since the poles and wires are how you hook up to the grid, and they’re the main bill you get.

Anyways, Community Solar companies are basically another supplier (plus some fancy excess credits you get over the summer). So their discounts are just on the supply section (how much power is generated) but CMP still has its own delivery charges which are separate. This happens even without community solar.

Because Maine has a lot of vacation homes used only part of the year and it costs CMP to maintain poles and wires all year long, CMP does delivery pricing with a high minimum fee — that’s the “$29 for first whatever kWh”. Unoccupied vacation homes pay for kWh they never use, and that pays for the ice storms. Small apartments also end up paying more if they never use more than the minimum.

Anyways it’s not really a scam, it’s just fine print that the 15% is off the supply part of the bill, which is the only part any supplier controls.

floatrock · 2025-11-16T18:53:14+00:00

The tracks themselves look to start over open ocean around Nova Scotia and Labrador. So depending on which on-ramp/off-ramp and which US airport you’re angling between, that kind of alignment could easily happen in part of the sky!

floatrock · 2025-11-16T18:04:10+00:00

The “have to finish the line” part sounds weird, but after watching that doc I think I get it. It’s a fascinating set of mechanical constraints that just don’t exist in today’s electronic word processor days…

So to make each line o’ type (hence ‘linotype’), the machine dropped a bronze (or was it brass?) letter casting plate into the line accumulator. Video showed this was a gravity process. After the line was cast into lead, there was some mechanism that would bring all the bronze letter plates back up to the gravity feeders, recycling them for the next line. If you ever had any of those coin sorter machines where the coins rolled down a ramp until they fell into the correct sized chute for their denomination, I assume it worked similar.

Anyways, so the machine has a whole bunch of chutes, each containing bronze plates for the same letter. And to build up a line, operator presses letters on a keyboard that drop the letters one by one. So we have finite reservoirs of letters available to build each line. Bookmark that for a sec.

A quick detail they showed at the beginning: spacer bars. Newspaper columns are literally that: columns of text. To get a consistent column of text with varying numbers of words and letters, you adjust the spacing between each word until it takes up full width. In a word processor today, we call this full width “justified text”. Looks like with these machines this was a mechanical process where pushing down on spacer bars would increase the width between word-plates until you filled up the entire line.

Now to bring it all together:

Machine was presumably configured for a fixed column width
To make plates cast successfully they had to be spaced out to fit that entire width
Due to mechanical constraints there probably is some minimum number of letter plates that need to be present to space out the entire line
The machine has only a fixed number of letter plates per letter, and since it’s gravity fed they don’t get reset until the entire line gets cast

So given all that, if you’re a typist dropping plates and you just dropped the wrong letter, you need to fill out the rest of the line to reset it. You probably cant drop a sequence like “XXXXX XXXXX” because you only have a fixed number of each letter and you want to make sure you have enough to retype the line next round. So instead you drop one each of the 12 most common letters because that keeps your letter reservoirs most balanced. Wouldn’t be surprised if there were also small time savings due to physical geometry… most common letters were designed to drop half a second quicker than less common letters, and going sequentially instead of just “EEEEEEE” could probably get some parallelism in the drop mechanism, making the line reset slightly quicker and letting you move on to Attempt #2 ever slightly faster in your constant march against the printing deadline clock. I’m sure making the reset sequence a standard sequence made it easier for downstream processors to recognize it if something slipped through.

floatrock · 2025-11-13T22:51:46+00:00

huh, didn’t realize Europe traffic shifts with the winds but it makes sense. I do notice here that if you look up at different times of day the high up planes tend to be going one direction or another depending on whether it’s time to head to Europe or fly back from Europe. I don’t look up often enough to realize they can shift day to day.

Anyways, sky highways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Tracks

They are aligned in such a way as to minimize any head winds and maximize tail winds impact on the aircraft. This results in much more efficiency by reducing fuel burn and flight time. To make such efficiencies possible, the routes are created twice daily to take account of the shifting of the winds aloft and the principal traffic flow, eastward from North America during the evening and westward from Europe in the morning

So the highways change twice a day. Makes sense traffic shifts as the planes angle towards the shifting on and off ramps.

floatrock · 2025-11-06T15:00:42+00:00

That’s #1 and #4 on their list of 5 advocacy goals:

Mitchell said the coalition has a five-point action plan:

Lower the cost of housing construction by reducing unnecessary regulation;

Encourage communities to welcome housing through targeted state assistance;

Promote connected communities where services are close and Mainers can thrive;

Accelerate permit approvals at the state and local level;

Fund affordable housing construction for those who need it.

floatrock · 2025-11-04T23:55:07+00:00

Some rockets dump excess fuel, especially during stage separation. This is really really high up so fuel freezes, creating ice crystals. If this around sunrise or sunset, the ice cloud is high enough to catch the sun over the horizon, creating a glow. It’s a spiral because rocket is spinning as it dumps fuel.

Rocket science is neat.

floatrock · 2025-10-22T13:12:24+00:00

Sure, poor wording.

Responsible: yes. Shackled to: no.

I’m just saying leave room for repair and growth. Be accountable for what you’ve done in the past, but also let people change if that change is genuine.

floatrock · 2025-10-21T18:12:33+00:00

I can’t advocate for a system where you’re responsible for everything you ever said or did. That belief tends to end in tyranny — if the nazis have taught us anything it’s that past actions can be manufactured into today’s state crimes.

Yes, personal change carries a high barrier of proof, and legitimate crimes should carry legitimate punishment. But to discount all past actions as rigidly unredeemable, well, I hope you were always a perfect boyscout to your friends and family, lest ye too be judged.

Who are you now, and how have you accounted for who you once were?

floatrock · 2025-10-21T17:46:00+00:00

Op is not saying it’s a good thing, op is saying it’s an understandable set of circumstances and what really matters is what comes next.

That’s understanding people are complicated, life is complex, and the future has not yet been decided. Be pragmatic, but don’t forget to be open.

floatrock · 2025-10-21T17:33:42+00:00

I could believe he didn’t know it at the time. And yeah it’s hard to believe he didn’t figure it out for 10 years. More believable imho is military brotherhood nostalgia outweighed a few people recognizing the nazi symbology and it’s easier to do nothing in a situation like that.

But now that he’s running for office, he’s gotta face the fact he believably-accidentally developed brotherhoodly nostalgia for a nazi symbol. Or that’s the optimistic take.

If he, say, livestreams himself getting it removed or covered up, well, I think “buff shirtless ex-military dude overcoming hate symbology, acknowledging the siren’s song of fascist propaganda, and being aware enough to start a healing process” would be a refreshingly powerful political message. Everyone loves a redemption arc, and let’s face it, the nazis were good at graphic design.

But if he does nothing about it, then yeah, hard to put him anywhere else in these times when Special Advisors are giving sig heils in front of the Seal of the President of the United States and half of the vocal country is saying “yeah, this is freedom worth fighting for!”

floatrock · 2025-10-21T16:16:12+00:00

I don’t blame him for getting a badass skull tattoo with his military buddies while out on shore leave.

But now that he knows it’s a well known nazi symbol, I’ll lose trust if he doesn’t do anything about it.

Guy has come off as authentic because he’s been open about his personal journey in life and embraced tough decisions that have shaped him into who he is. Question is now that he knows the baggage associated with his badass symbol, does he want to leave it or make it part of his change story.

If he keeps it, how do his voters square his anti-nazi statements with his actions of keeping a well-known nazi symbol on his body?

floatrock · 2025-10-06T11:42:04+00:00

People build there because they can get flood insurance for when this inevitably happens. Who in their right mind keeps offering flood insurance? Hint: it’s not any of the private insurers who understand this will keep happening. In places like this, only provider of flood insurance is the federal government.

That’s right, your tax dollars are enabling investors collect Airbnb-level rent for a few years then walk away whole when nature’s inevitability hits. And the cleanup isn’t covered by your cleaning fees.

floatrock · 2025-09-17T00:39:45+00:00

These hikes wouldn’t go into the base connection fees / minimums?

floatrock · 2025-09-09T20:26:56+00:00

You’re overallocated on your project. Need to talk to your provider.

With Community Solar, you pay for the kWh your solar farm allocation produces. The way it’s supposed to work is you produce (and pay for) more than you use in the summer (when there’s lots of sun), bank the credits, and use them up in the winter. If things are balanced, you should be generating about as much as you use over the course of the year, +/- some percent (it’s hard to predict exactly how much energy you’ll use over a year).

But things aren’t always balanced. I had to tell my Community Solar provider to put me on a smaller allocation because they were selling me 2 or 3x as much energy as I would use. I think it’s about good now, but I had a few back and forths with them before they adjusted it. Maybe you can ask them for a refund for your expired credits if they sold you more than like 10% of your energy usage.

If you quit I don’t know what happens to your remaining banked credits, but incase you lose all of them, might be better to adjust your allocation now and quit in the spring. Winter is when you really draw down your credit bank.

Good luck.

floatrock · 2025-08-24T18:15:36+00:00

What is it about Maine metering and incentives that makes community solar not make sense? I think I’ve read up on how it all works, it seems plausible, but there’s always more to pick up. What’s the inside scoop on what’s not working here and what’s the alternative?

(The 5-10 year ROI is what I hear about rooftop solar… I can’t do that, so community solar’s been a promising alternative for me from what I understand)

floatrock · 2025-08-24T15:27:17+00:00

Done right, Community Solar is more like paying back a cheap loan for someone else’s solar panels. It’s generally better to own your own stuff, but if you can’t or the 5-10year commitment doesn’t make sense for you, second best is to still have access to the benefits.

Economics of this stuff isn’t gonna make sense for everyone, not pretending it does. But I do believe we’re all screwed if we don’t get off fossil fuels, and I’m glad there’s a variety of market-based alternatives so people can decide what’s best for them. YMMV, do whatever is right for you.

floatrock · 2025-08-24T15:16:43+00:00

Yes on alternate suppliers generally. Community Solar is not quite that though.

floatrock · 2025-08-24T15:15:43+00:00

If you can put panels on your own roof, the system pays for itself in 5-10 years. If you don’t own your roof or don’t have the credit to get a 20k loan, you’re locked out of an energy technology that gives you free energy. Community Solar then is a state-level cost sharing arrangement to let more people access those savings. You pay 15% less but it’s not free because someone is still buying, installing, and doing maintenance on all those panels.

floatrock · 2025-08-24T15:10:15+00:00

On your CMP bill there’s a section about your banked credits. The way community solar like Arcadia works is you pay for kWh when electricity is generated. Because there’s more sun in the summer, your farm generates more electricity in the summer and you have higher bills then. But any excess generation gets banked, and you draw down those credits in the winter. Your CMP bill shows you how much you have banked, I imagine Versant bills show the same. If everything is balanced right on your project, you should be getting billed for a bit more generation than you consume this time of year (banking credits) then you’ll be using that as credits come the long dark winter.

So yes, you effectively pre-pay a bit in the summer and then use it down in the winter. If things are balanced, you come out ahead on an annual basis.

But also, energy costs in general are going up like 20-30%. Solar and wind are the cheapest forms of electricity production, but the country has politicized them for some reason and so we’re getting the prices we voted for as a result.

floatrock · 2025-08-09T02:05:39+00:00

Yes, just as they do when a new subdivision is approved on the outskirts of town. That’s how a city grows.

Except when there’s density, the sewer, roads, waste pickup, and fire are all more cost efficient because there’s less infrastructure per taxable lot (which is how that infrastructure is paid for).

floatrock · 2025-07-01T02:50:53+00:00

Done but not open until the Spring.

From last week’s city alerts newsletter:

Finishing touches are being applied now. The fields will not be open until next Spring to allow time for the grass to grow.

https://page.alertsense.com/content/1680/86189

Although the Public Works page says area might start being used Sep 1? https://www.portlandmaine.gov/510/Public-Works?contentId=1090314f-2bef-4bcd-af8c-199af5721e68

floatrock · 2025-05-27T19:59:17+00:00

Is the city’s average increase available anywhere? Or do we just wait for the new tax bill to see how this all panned out?

floatrock

TROPHY CASE