RIP: Steve Harwell, 56 - Smash Mouth founding singer

Steve left Smash Mouth two years ago and has been in hospice recently, succumbing to liver failure. October '21 was his last performance with the band at a festival, his performance was erratic and he was described as having Wernicke encephalopathy, which is a neurological disorder caused by a collapse of B vitamins in your system - frequently caused by massive alcoholism.

Smash Mouth had a major hit with All Star, then the movie Shrek came out and it resurged. Myself, I think Walkin' on the Sun is much cooler song.

He was one of two founding members of Smash Mouth to be still with the band, at least up until his departure in '21.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/steve-harwell-smash-mouth-singer-dead-obituary-1234817636/

Electric vehicles can go up in flames after being submerged in water

Such as, say, the two hurricanes that have struck Florida in the last twelve months or so.

If the battery gets submerged, it can begin to form salt crystal bridges between battery cells that will cause short circuits, then *POOF* and we have ignition! It takes a crazy amount of water to extinguish an EV battery, so you don't want this to happen, especially if the car is still in your garage!

Officials are advising people with EVs that have become submerged significantly or completely to NOT keep it in your garage, move it at least 50' away from any occupied structures, and notify your insurance company just like if you'd been in an accident.

Some people think that because you don't have an internal combustion engine that it's safe to drive through deep water. It isn't. Last year's FL hurricane saw a few dozen EVs burn, this year at least two - one of them while being transported by the fire department!

This is not specifically a Tesla problem, any EV can have this happen to it if the battery gets submerged. One of the problems is that some fire departments don't understand how to fight an EV battery fire: they just pump water on top, rather than trying to get water underneath it where the battery is, and that water sprayed on top is pretty much wasted. One department made a rig that they could position under the car, then drive a spike into the battery compartment to open a hole, that allowed them to spray water directly into the battery! Very effective technique to get the water into the source of combustion.

I've heard that the foam that fire trucks can spray isn't very effective against EV battery fires, I don't know the details.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hurricane-idalia-electric-car-caught-fire-tesla/

The satellite industry has a huge problem - INSURANCE

It's an interesting problem. Insurance is a pool of shared risk. We all pay to insure our cars, but only a small number of us will have a loss through an accident or theft and need to make a claim, so insurance companies can be overall profitable.

The satellite insurance industry is a bit different. Take, for example, StarLink. Musk launches 30+ satellites in a single throw, expecting some will fail or won't reach orbit or whatever. He doesn't care. They aren't insured, and more will be going up soon enough to make up the coverage of the ones that didn't make it. And lots of people are having him launch lots of small satellites with the same philosophy. And there is the problem: they're not buying insurance, so while the number of satellites being launched is increasing, the pool is kinda static and not growing.

Enter ViaSat.

The launched an insured billion dollar satellite. Actually, they have a few in orbit. And there was a power supply failure on an absolutely critical subsystem. We're talking a subsystem that if it doesn't work, you've got a gigantic paperweight in orbit that can't do what it was launched for. Why said system was not multi-redundant, I do not know. They have another satellite in orbit that developed an antenna problem and is not working nearly up to spec. Also insured. These satellites could represent legitimate claims of over Seven Hundred Million U.S. Dollars.

From the article: "In 2019, the total losses from satellite claims amounted to $788 million, which overwhelmed the total premiums for the year at $500 million." The next year, three big insurers stopped offering satellite insurance.

What happens when insurance carriers stop offering insurance? Well, you can't buy it if they're not selling it. Do you build and launch a billion dollar satellite if you can't get insurance for it? California has a problem right now with car insurance: extremely hard for people entering the market to get it, or to get above bare minimum coverage at high prices as companies have been leaving the California market. So if your car gets totaled and you and the other guy both have bare minimums, you could be on the hook for a lot of money to get your car replaced if you still have a note against it!

Is space the next frontier? This could put a major crimp in the satellite industry.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billion-dollar-satellite-risks-upending-093002573.html

https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/09/04/0149214/how-a-billion-dollar-satellite-risks-upending-the-space-insurance-industry