And they really mean "absolute max". See these pictures of Panamax ships being carefully squeezed through the locks.[1]
The original two lock lanes were built in 1917, and they were built big for the time. But bigger ships are now available and won't fit. So the Panama Canal Authority just finished a third lock lane, with longer, wider, and deeper locks, for larger ships.[2] There were problems with the new construction, including serious leaks in the concrete. But the new locks open for business in 10 days.
Here's good drone imagery of the new locks being used by a ship for the first test run.[3]
If you're really into this, here's a video of the basic operational procedures for using the new locks.[4] A maximum sized, fully loaded container ship pays about $1M in tolls for each transit. That's about $85 per container. There's a loyalty program for regular customers, with discounts.
One of the other things the new locks do is try to save water. The lake at the center of Panama is at a higher elevation than the ocean on either side - each time the locks are cycled water flows from the lake to the oceans.
The water in the lake is only refilled during Panama's rainy season, and drought conditions in recent years have on occasion made it necessary to put restrictions on the ships transiting the system.[1]
Those huge basins next to the new locks in the video are a water cycling system. They aim to capture a significant percentage of the water as they cycle the locks and then re-use it, rather than just draining the lakes.
One thing that baffles me is the fact that ok, the third lane is bigger; but it's one lane vs the existing two. If everyone started using only New Panamax ships, they would effectively cut in half the number of ships that can go through (and would likely have congestion issues because of alternating directions of travel). Just to balance that, new ships should have 100% more capacity, but spec numbers look 50% bigger at best.
Is there a plan to enlarge at least one of the existing lanes, once the new lane is open?
I opened it side-by-side with my other tabs (using win + left arrow, win + right arrorw) after pulling the tab out. That way I can continue browsing without actually putting the other tab in the background.
It is a silly restriction!
edit: mootothemax's suggestion is even better, I didn't realize the tab can go in the background after being split out.
I create a new account on every site I use roughly once a year. I've no interest in reputation and there's no way to gain from keeping one account going. I know I'm not alone in doing this.
Another thing I thought of was using the <table> tag for layout.
It's austere, as well as an anti-pattern when used exclusively. Despite this, it just plain gets the job done. It has also proven quite sturdy/reliable, even on popular sites like this one.
One of the things I kind of miss about the table based layouts of yesteryear was it seemed to be a lot easier to make sites that looked good in terminal/text based web browsers. The modern idea of doing all of your actual layout in CSS doesn't degrade as well for text based browsers.
Here's a challenge for you frontend hackers out there: show me a now standard <ul> based horizontal nav-bar... that also renders horizontally in w3m and lynx.
Why does it have to render horizontally? I think the goal is that the text-based layout is just a simple outline, and CSS is used to get a spatial layout. It sounds like you want a little of both worlds. You're right tables can be hacked to do that, but you're going against the grain of the technology, and I'd ask what you hope to gain?
I think many "frontend hackers" spend their time focused on what can be done and not enough on what should be done. This is a side-effect of our hyperspecialization culture which discourages designers and developers pushing back on each other, out of fear of stepping on each others' expertise. But I think that fear prevents the kind of real collaboration that's required to make a great UI.
I've always felt a little uncomfortable using <ul> for a horizontal nav bar (although I'm aware that is a common usage). <ul> is a block level element and so is not semantically correct for a horizontal set of elements.
This just happens to be the default style. At its core, <ul> is an unordered list. Whether you happen to arrange the items horizontally, vertically, or any other way, is just presentation. Which is precisely why CSS is separate from HTML.
Any plans to share your experience creating the app or to show off the code itself?
Anything worth working on for 6 months is likely interesting to learn more about. Plus, it's always nice to find out how others tackle ambitious personal projects.
Some quick feedback: changing pages (eg: navigating from 'new' to 'inspiration', 'sources', etc...) while in night mode switches the user back to day mode, which can be quite jarring.
If you go to 'Manage sources' and set the default theme to dark - it will work for both 'News' and 'Inspiration'. But yeah dark mode everywhere (even in manage sources) is something we need to work on.
>"About 80% of small business loan applications in the US are denied."
Wow, I thought 80% was an overstatement. You are very much correct with regards to the "big" banks.
See: "big banks – that is, banks with $10 billion or more in assets – approved of 21.3 percent of small business loan applications in January 2015, up from 21.1 percent the month prior" [0]
Even worse... a huge portion of loans to small businesses are made through secondary lenders charging 10-28% on the money. This debt burden increases default risk at the same time as it decreases additional investment.
Also, that's 80% of official applications. Countless others were given soft nos - "don't bother applying as a start-up/fico under 680/time in business under 3 years" etc.
Yup. Couldn't even get a LOC for $15k when we had cash reserves of $35k and 2 years in business making $250k/year because we wouldn't become personal guarantors on the loan and we were a risky startup.... that was cash finances, no debt....
Okay. I don't pretend to understand. (We wanted the line to service hard goods / inventory instead of cash servicing inventory, which is a standard retail tactic. Oh well.)
[0]: https://github.com/cjjeakle/devbox-setup