b_t_s

true. It's like the the only reason I open FB anymore....craigslist that isn't a PITA.

Or it's worth buying a decent power sharpener. One black friday I picked up a worksharp(1/2 in belt sharpener with jig) and it's right up there with the microwave and instantpot for being worth the money and space in the kitchen. A few times a year I sharpen every single non-serated knife in the kitchen (2 blocks) and it only takes like 5-10 minutes total. And yea having a few extra cheap chefs knives lets me push it to 6 months or so till I start running out of sharp chefs knives.

ER wait-times aren't 2-4 hours just because.

ER wait times are long because ERs are the only place in the country where we effectively have medicare for all, albeit in a particularly perverse and dysfunctional form. Everyone gets treated at the ER even if they're broke & uninsured as long as they're willing to wait long enough. Now imagine if those folks could go to any primary care doc or even use One Medical, CVS walk-in clinic etc. That would go a long way toward fixing our overloaded ERs. We've legislated quazi-medicare for all but only in the most inappropriate part of the system.

Same thing you do if AWS goes down. Same thing we used to do back in the desktop days when the power went out. Heck one day before WFH was common we all got the afternoon off 'cause the toilets were busted and they couldn't keep 100 people in an office with no toilets. Stuff happens. And if that's really not acceptable, you invest in solutions with the understanding that you're dumping a lot of cash into inefficient solutions for rare problems.

Some teas(white and green particularly) are better brewed well under boiling, but even those lower temps kill 99.9...% of pathogens in a few seconds(vs a fraction of a second at full boiling)

same. I've settled on Empower + google sheets. Empower mostly as a free shortcut to pulling a dozen account balances in seconds. Sheets for keeping quarterly snapshots(in case empower goes away like mint did) and for turning those snapshots into a graph. Took a little setup, but then it's like 15 minutes once a quarter when I get the calendar reminder. Wish I had data going further back in time, but I'm not sure what I'd do with more detail/a full budget. The only things I've ever really cared about are approximate net worth/investment returns as a sanity check on retirement assumptions.

It's a weird hybrid. There is a connection to a persons earnings but it's far from what most people mean by a personal account(savings, 401k, IRA). It's closer to an annuity, but a very generous/flexible one that no private company would offer. The difference is minor for the never married but not for most people, and there are unusual cases. I know a guy who retired overseas, married a young wife and had kids. They get like 180% his benefit till the kids hit 18. Then assuming he's passed, the wife gets 100% survivor benefit at 60. I figure his SS account will probably pay out around 3x what it would if he was a bachelor, and that's strictly needs based not contribution based. If, instead, it was a 401k or a personal lifetime annuity at his personal benefit amount, their financial situation would be a whole lot uglier.

Life in the last century or so has become far less conducive to oral history with travel and entertainment. It's much easier to maintain an oral history when live storytelling & music are practically the only form of entertainment and your extended family has lived in the same place for many generations. Still it's not that uncommon even today. I don't know much about my mothers family but I grew up hearing occasional stories and genealogy about the famous ancestor on my fathers side despite the fact that he died over a century ago on another continent. And boy oh boy did we get an education when we went back to visit the old family farm...found out I was related to him at least 2 different ways, as well as half the people on that stretch of road and the hotel owner in town. It seemed like there wasn't a person in town who couldn't tell you their connection to the only really significant person/even in the towns history.

I think this is probably very genre specific. I suspect the nonfiction and realistic fiction boy/manly/macho genres(outdoors, machines, fighting, and the like) may have been especially cannibalized by games/video. I don't recall seeing any of this stuff on my last trip to a physical bookstore. But on the fantasy/geeky side there are more great options than there have ever been, and, as a girldad, I can tell you that female main characters are tough to find.

I'm saying that it's more convenient for me to read on the phone in all situations I can imagine. Even at home....I just sat down, kicked up the recliner, and decided to read a noeel rather than the cookbook on the end table or putting something on TV. The phone is in my pocket and the e-reader is in another room, maybe in need of a charge, maybe in need of a sync. Maybe I should have thought about that before I sat down but I didn't. Sure I could choose to change my habits, but changing habits is difficult and inconvenient. And even once I've succeeded, the new habit takes more time and effort which is inconvenient. That inconvenience is modest and may be totally worth it for the (to your mind significant) benefits of an e-reader. But it is still an inconvenience. First world problems to be sure, but I will not expend 5% more effort for a 2% increase(my number, yours is a lot higher) in reading device quality, and I'm hardly alone in that decision.

It's wildly more convenient to read on a phone. I prefer the screen, form factor, and overall UX of an e-reader for extended reading sessions, but I haven't turned mine on in years because the phone is just sooooo much more convenient. Most e-readers don't fit in a pocket, and even if they do it's annoying to have to guess when I'll need it and carry the 2nd device. Whenever I have downtime....airport, doctors office, curbisde pickup, wife isn't ready to check out yet, lunch takes 5 minutes in the microwave....that phone/kindle for iOS is always ready to go. I probably do half my reading in 5-15 minute increments of formerly dead time. For a while I even tried switching to the e-reader whenever I sat down to read "for real", but even the relatively painless syncing process wasn't worth the minor UX benefits of the ereader. The phone is my least favorite way to read, but convenience is the one category where it absolutely mops the floor with e-readers(and paper for that matter).

No expert but:

From day 1 OPEC has been a loose association off frenemies that occasionally manage to work together for a while when enough of them are sufficiently hurting/greedy at the same time. They break due to producer rivalries every few years.

Oil in the ground is marginally more valuable than pie in the sky. There is nearly unlimited oil in the ground, but you have to find it, extract it, and show a profit after you subtract your expenses. Each step is harder than the last. Saudi oil is like $10 a barrel to produce. You can practically dig it up with a shovel. And it's high quality...a benchmark grade that a lot of the world's refineries are set up for. Much of Venezuelas oil is deep underwater and/or garbage quality. Think huge expensive deep water oil rigs and pumping high pressure kerosene into the ground to loosen up the tar/oil sands enough to get a nasty chunky sandy sludge out of the ground that a lot of refineries can't even process. And it doesn't help that they're under sanctions and don't domestically produce a lot of the equipment they need to extract their oil. And rampant corruption. Venezuela's massive reserves have equally massive challenges turning into profitable oil production.

The combined height of a blackhawk and a large jet is about 60ft. The combined length is a bit over 300ft, and since neither aircraft is unlikely to be level, some portion of that length gets contributed to their effective height while flying. Just given the size of the aircraft, I wouldn't be surprised if they can potentially overlap even if their altimeters are 100ft apart.

The old prison favorite of a lock in a a sock can very easily be fatal & probably weights 1/4 to 1/2 of a pound. I once reforged a ball peen hammer into a 1 handed warhammer. It was either a 12 or 16 ounce head, so quite light, really too light to get full power. It was shocking how much adding 6 inches to the handle increased the power. The spike end would easily do 1.5 to 2 inches through plate steel(maybe 3/16 or 1/8 inch) & even the sharp(90 degree) corners of the hammer head would pierce that plate if the strike wasn't flush and peel it back can opener style a half inch. It really takes very little mass to break bone provided you can get good speed, a relatively hard small impact point, and no armor/padding in the way. Skulls, hands, forearms, and shins are very vulnerable.

yea things are crazy now. We're in war mode but nobody knows why. We've been reliably profitable for a decade. And yet we're doing super high risk cost reduction projects that have significant risk of burning down the entire business and have already destroyed what used to be a very skilled and mature engineering team. I get the impression that's a fairly typical story now.

As long as they finally start adding plugin hybrids to the lineup. I'm itching to buy a PHEV tacoma, but it looks like midsize trucks will be the last form factor to get any decent options.

Heh, I tend to agree with this. Unfortunately reality always seems to disagree. No matter how simple the job, _something_ new will go wrong that requires multiple trips to home depo, putting it back together & ordeing parts off amazon, or bodging together some sort of fix that's kinda trash but gets the stupid thing working again today.

Risk your life doing what? Eating? All food allergies are deadly. They might not have killed you yet, but every single exposure could be your last. And plenty of people, especially kids, are allergic to 4, 5, 6, 7 major allergens. Maybe you're familiar with adults who have grown out of all but 1 or 2 allergies & know what to avoid. Try feeding a kid who's allergic to soy, wheat, dairy and eggs. Heck, even just soy. Try to put together a week of meals without soy with our modern food supply. Spaghetti:soy. Burgers:soy. Ice cream:soy. Tacos:soy. Sandwiches:soy. The entire soup aisle:soy. What's left, drinking Ensure for every meal? Nope, that has soy _and_ dairy. Robust accurate food labeling is the only way people with several food allergies can eat a remotely normal and balanced diet without playing Russian roulette at every meal.

and lose profit. If they spend the money to run a safe production line and pass the cost on the the consumer they will loose market share to the company that runs an unsafe production line & keeps the price the same. It's also especially expensive if the do it quickly. It's been a few years, so fortunately some of them have actually gotten around to updating their production lines by now. T hey just did it slowly in the cheapest, least disruptive way possible.

Sociopathy is probably a more accurate diagnosis than psychopathy. And corporations are inherently sociopathic. By definition their primary motive is profit and there are often strong incentives on those in charge to ignore ethical considerations. It's probably the #1 reason we have consumer protection, and environmental protection laws.

Safest from a corporate liability perspective, not from an inadvertently killing kids perspective. What you're suggesting is precisely what substantially all brands did with sesame, and it's why my family stopped eating hamburgers and hotdogs for several years...because we were literally unable to buy buns that would reliably not kill my daughter. The bread situation was almost as bad. We eventually found 1 brand available at 1 store and were able to feed her sandwiches once again. Now it wasn't much of a risk for our family because we understand how deadly allergies can be and we read ingredients carefully. But for kids whose parents are less careful, some of them die, particularly when there are zero safe options and you don't know if manufacturers are really adding the allergen or just saying they do for legal reasons(both were common). And it sounds like you may be referring to the common belief & research around early/small dose exposure helping kids avoid/outgrow allergies, but what's often lost in those conversations is that it sometimes works, and sometimes makes the allergies worse or even kills you, and nobody has the faintest clue why or which will happen to you. That's why the research generally includes allergen+medication, because the medication is necessary to avoid accidentally killing some percentage of the patients.

Video conferencing is probably the #1 time I just don't have nearly enough screen space. I'm always switching back and forth between dev tools, chat, whatever's being presented, other video chat participants. Would be great to be able to fit all that in front of me where I can switch with a glance.

It might sound silly, but I would be fine using this with a keyboard and touchpad. The lousy thing about working from a laptop is the screen being tiny and in the wrong place. It's bad in general, but it's intolerable on a plane. This solves that.

Alkaline batteries are still what runs most consumer battery powered gadgets. 4 alkaline batteries are nominally 6v(actually 5-6.6 depending on charge), so 6.2v seems perfect if you want to run a 4x battery device on a more permanent power source.

Working at a higher level of abstraction doesn't necessarily mean we need fewer programmers, because it also means that more projects are economically viable. The software I write now with its complexity and degree of UI polish would be laughably uneconomical with the tools and techniques I was using 20 years ago. Even working at the same company on the same app, 10 years ago I was probably 5x less productive with older tools, yet we've 5xd our headcount in that time despite those efficiency gains. So yea there will certainly be companies that need fewer devs, but there will be new opportunities unlocked(though admittedly the transition process can be brutal on the individual level even when things work out well in the end)

I would consider that to be their primary job function. Especially at the higher levels. The rule of law would break down if they didn't. Laws are like product specs. They cover the core stuff as best they can, but there are invariably areas where they are a bit buggy, ambiguous, and incomplete. We already have problems with loopholes, but if judges weren't allowed to to exercise some degree of reasonable judgement when things are not 100% crystal clear those problems would be orders of magnitude worse.

Then that would point toward a Ukrainan likely making the Ярун mistake. I suppose they'd be even more prone to not checking the country and assuming it's the one nearby/in their country.

The Tu-141 has a range of about 1000km, so presumably 2000km one way. Draw a 2000km line form Zagreb through pretty much anywhere in Ukraine and you end up a little way over the border into Russia. Seems pretty obvious what could have happened and not terribly surprising. The surprising thing to me is that it crashed in a city center vs the countryside. edit: Though the Jarun/Yarun both spelled "Ярун" theory would totally explain that.

Many reasons, the first few I can think of are: 1) It's not a _few_ hundred, it happens to be exactly 100 in Nevada. 2) That was spread over many years vs a couple days of a war. 3) They were in a barren desert, the "safest" place we could find. 4) They were all early bombs, nothing compared to the modern stuff. H-bombs literally use nukes as detonators, so it's like comparing blasting caps to C4.

We quickly realized this was a terrible idea(some tests in NV had intense fallout in NY) and stopped doing atmospheric tests by 1963.

It's safe to say we know different demographics. I think this is more of an EU thing than a US thing. Also, likely an upper middle class or greater thing. I'm from the US and even pre-covid, most Americans in the bottom 80% of incomes are not "holidaying" anywhere, domestic or overseas on a regular basis. A large percentage of the remainder stick to the US for the majority of their vacations. Pretty much everyone I know(mostly top 20% earners) who travels overseas more than once a decade or so is foreign born, or at least 2nd generation, and traveling to visit family.

Apparently 42% of Americans have passports now, but it was about half that just a decade ago, and I'd attribute most of the growth to immigration, not vacations. Anecdotal, I'd say in SEAsia the "foreigners" I encountered were like 80% European. In Central America, the cheapest/shortest flight from the US, it was still like 50% Europeans. Whenever we're finally able to visit my wife's family again, she's goin to have to get special permission to take unpaid vacation time or else change jobs in order to be get enough time to make the trip to Asia worthwhile. That's pretty typical here.