£80 for 60 days of full coverage would be fantastic rates for an American. Many are paying $350/month for insurance, and still have +$5000 deductibles.

Yup. Voyager/Wefwef is basically the new Apollo. It’s not 100% there in terms of feature parity, but it’s damned close and is being actively developed.

Also, government is built for stability, not efficiency. Ever heard of a company Bus Number? It’s how many individual employees can get hit by a bus, and the company continues to operate without interruption. A higher bus number means less efficiency, but also more stability. And importantly, even the most efficient companies should never have a bus number of 0, because that’s just setting your company up for failure.

If you have one dude down in IT who has been silently plugging away for 20 years, does all of the weekly server maintenance tasks without making a huge fuss about it, has slowly absorbed other duties throughout the years, etc? Yeah, if he gets hit by a bus, your company is likely fucked. Maybe not right away, but soon enough, when all of those “extra” tasks suddenly aren’t getting done and begin to pile up. Even if the company immediately re-hires for the position, the new person won’t know everything that the old dude was doing. Since the old dude had just been quietly soldiering on, a lot of his job duties were tacit and implied, rather than being written in a job description anywhere. The bus number is 0 in a surprising amount of multimillion dollar companies, because efficiency means there’s just one or two people holding everything together.

Imagine if the DMV was forced to close for the week, just because Janet in accounting got the flu and she was the only one who knew how to do some mission-critical task. Or even worse, what if City Hall shut down after a tornado landed across town? Because one or two people across town happened to work at City Hall, and were affected. People would lose their goddamned minds, because crisis is when people need the government the most. People expect roads to be cleared of debris, power lines to be repaired, access restored to blocked neighborhoods, water service to be restored, etc… But if the government has a low bus number, there’s a good chance that the government will shut down when a few government employees are affected. The bloat is, in large part, a redundancy to ensure continued operation. The government never has just one person capable of doing a task.

It’s tedious, but it’s mostly just a matter of waiting for the water to heat back up afterwards.

Unplug the heater, then run the bathtub until you’re out of hot water. Turn off the bathtub, and turn off the water supply going into the heater. Attach a garden hose to the bottom of the heater, and run it to a drain somewhere. Turn the hot water on somewhere like a sink, to provide a vent to the system; It won’t run because the supply is turned off, but it’ll at least allow air into the system for when you drain the heater. Use the spigot at the bottom of the heater to drain it.

Be prepared for a gross rush of water at first, because all of the sediment and rust will have settled to the bottom of the heater where the spigot is. Once it’s drained, you can do whatever maintenance you need. For instance, you probably need to replace the cathode rod, which is designed to wear away over time to protect the rest of the heater from corrosion.

To do a final flush, you can open the water inlet at the top of the tank. It’ll help drain any last remaining sediment out of the tank. Then turn off the water inlet, turn off the spigot, disconnect the hose, and leave the sink tap open while you refill the tank with fresh water.

The whole process only takes like 30 minutes, and then you’re just waiting for the heater to come back up to temperature afterwards.

My wife was caught up in that Ebola scare, because she was on the same plane that the nurse (who had been treating Ebola patients and knew she had been exposed) flew in on. The feds came knocking on her door, and basically said that if anyone in the household left the house, they would immediately go to prison. They put ankle monitors on everyone in the household, and security tape across all the doors and windows so none could be opened without visibly breaking the tape. The CDC called every hour or so to do mandatory temperature checks, and they had to talk to every person in the household to make sure everyone was still present.

Apparently she almost got fired over it, because her manager initially didn’t believe her. She tried to pull the typical “if you’re sick you need to find someone to cover your shifts. If you can’t find anyone, you need to come in” BS that is rampant in retail. It wasn’t until my wife had the feds call her manager and basically tell her “she’s 100% under quarantine, and if you encourage her to break it we’ll haul your ass in front of a judge” that the manager relented.

That’s my concern. It’ll go the way of climate change and school shootings.

The narrative will shift from “it doesn’t happen” to “there’s nothing we can do to stop it” to “why even bother? It’s normal so it’s not a big deal.”

I think you need to read more than the first five words of my comment, because that’s the exact opposite of what I said.

Oh it absolutely will be, but they would have found other justifications to pardon people anyways. This gives them a convenient talking point, but they could have drawn one out of the ether anyways.

Ah you’re right. I was thinking of Lozito v. The City of New York. Same ruling; different circumstances.

Turn off half the breakers. Now you know which half the outlet is on, based on whether or not it has power. Repeat.

For instance, let’s say you have 100 breakers. You turn off the first 50. Your target outlet still has power. So now you have divided the potential number of breakers by half, and you know the breaker is somewhere in 51-100.

So you cut that in half, and turn off 51-75. Your outlet is now dead, so you know it’s somewhere in the 51-75 range that you just turned off; if it were still on, it would be somewhere between 76-100.

So now you reset 51-63, while leaving 64-75 off. It is still dead, so you know it is somewhere between 64-75.

Maybe now you turn on all of the odd breakers, leaving the evens off. It is still dead, so you know it must be 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, or 74. Reset the first three. Your outlet has power now, so it must be one of the first three.

Flip 64 and 66 off. If you get lucky, your outlet still has power and you know it is 68. But you get unlucky, and it is dead. So now you know it must be either 64 or 66.

Flip 64 back on. If it has power, you know it’s 64. If it doesn’t, you know it’s 66.

We just eliminated 99 breakers and found the correct one using only 7 tests. Because each test eliminated half of the potential values, it whittles things down very quickly. We went from 1-100, to 51-100, to 51-75, to 64-75, to the evens between 64-74, to only 64/66/68, to 64/66, and finally landed on 66 as the correct breaker. If we had gotten lucky earlier, we could have done it in 6 instead. If you had simply started with breaker 1 and worked subsequently, it would have taken 66 trips to the breaker box to figure out.

Where binary search really excels is with large data sets. Even if it had been 1000 breakers instead of 100, it still would have only taken an extra three or four searches (1-1000 > 1-500 > 1-250 > 1-125 > 1-75… etc…) to narrow it down.

If they don’t do their job and you have proof then they’re screwed

Nope, Warren v. District of Columbia had the SCOTUS rule that the police have no obligation to protect or serve. They can’t be sued for failing/refusing to do their job, even if it puts people in harm’s way.

The case revolved around a dude on a train who got stabbed. There was a psycho moving down the train cars stabbing people, and the police were chasing him. A passenger saw the attacker coming, saw the police in pursuit, and decided to help. He stopped the stabber, expecting the police to quickly catch up. Instead, the police locked the passenger inside the train car with the stabber, and watched through the tiny windows until the stabber was tired out from stabbing the passenger.

The passenger sued the police department, stating that they refused to protect him. The SCOTUS ruled that the police have no obligation to protect nor serve, and can’t be sued for failing to help you.

Honestly, if your security system didn’t allow you to set motion alerts, that’s a bad system. Basically any modern system will allow you to set motion alerts. You can specify a section (or sections) of the screen that will create a flag in the footage when motion is detected.

My job’s parking garage had a car get broken into, and a musician’s (very expensive) instrument was stolen. We didn’t have a camera pointed directly at the car that was broken into, but we had cameras at every entrance and exit, and on the ramps leading between each floor. Management was expecting to scrub through literal hours of footage. Using some basic motion detection, I set it to flag any time someone came up or went down the specific ramps or stairs that led to the level the car was on. It ended up being like 45 cars.

Then I just did a quick timer, to see how long each person lingered on the floor. Like 40 of the cars came up the ramp from the lower level, then like 30 seconds later went up the next ramp to the next level. So it wasn’t them. Only like five of the cars actually didn’t go to the next level.

And out of those five cars, four had drivers/passengers seen on the stairwells leading back down to the ground floor; They had parked on the same level as the incident, and went downstairs.

Only one car lingered on the same level for about 2 minutes, then quickly left again. At the exit, there was a camera on the gate which pointed into the cars. We got crystal clear footage of the driver, (someone who the musician knew) and the instrument case was very obviously sitting in the passenger seat.

The entire search (it was like 3 days of footage) took like 10 minutes total, simply by being able to whittle down when people were coming and going.

Discord is not a good replacement for support forums. Discord isn’t searchable by search engines.

Historically, if I had an issue with a product and I googled “[product] [issue]” I’d be met with a support forum post, with someone describing the same issue. I could read the thread to find how they resolved it. I don’t actually have to interact with the post at all, and I don’t need to ask the same question again. For most (decent) forums I don’t even need to make an account just to read the post.

Discord throws that all out the window. Now I’m met with a “JoiN OUr dIScoRd SerVEr to GEt suPPorT” page. Nothing is searchable via a search engine. And Discord’s server searchability (even in the app) has always been, at best, absolute dogshit. You already need to know exactly which text thread things were posted in, (because you can’t search the entire server at once), and you need to know exactly what was said, (because there’s no fuzzed search terms).

So 99% of the time, you just end up asking the same question that has already been asked a hundred times in the past, and now you need to wait for someone to respond. It also puts a lot more strain on the support staff, because they’re answering the same question a hundred times instead of just the once in a forum.

And don’t come at me with the “but Discord recently added a support forum feature where people can start threads and save the conversation for later” bullshit. That’s a band-aid, at best. It still isn’t searchable via search engines, so it means the above issues with Discord’s search function still apply, and the forum function is essentially useless as support forums.

Lastly, why the fuck should I be forced to join another server just to get support? What if I don’t have a discord account? What if I live in a region that Discord doesn’t support? What if I just plain don’t want to clog up my server sidebar with dozens of servers that I have only visited once? What if I just really hate the fact that your server has been configured to push notifications for every single message by default? What if I just fucking want to google my issue, and get an answer without any further effort?

It works even better when you use characters from the same movie. His nose is even rosy.

I mean, cars can be demystified the same way computers can: By building and maintaining it yourself. Everyone is afraid to build their first computer, because it seems way too complicated and delicate. Then you actually build your first one, and go “oh hey this actually isn’t so bad after all.”

Yes, cars (especially modern cars) have a lot more difficult-to-build parts. But modern cars are also a lot like computers in the sense that you don’t need to know every single component on an GPU to be able to install one. You don’t need to be able to build a car part from scratch. The same way you can slot a GPU into a motherboard, you can just buy the entire car part preassembled and bolt it into place. The important part is learning what the different components do, so you can troubleshoot them.

They’re referring to the term “ricing” that is used in the meme. In the car modding world, “ricing” is used as a pejorative to refer to the tricked out anime-wrapped cars, usually driven by Asian dudes or weebs. If a car is wrapped in anime characters and/or egirls, it has been “riced” and is referred to as a “ricer” It’s… Well… It’s not a polite term.

It comes from the old school rivalry between American muscle cars (which were big and heavy, but had good top speeds so they were popular for drag racing,) and Japanese cars (which tended to favor agility, tight handling, and good acceleration.) At the time, tricked out cars were popular among Japanese car enthusiasts, so the term started getting used by boomers to refer to Japanese people who mod cars. Then younger generations heard it, assumed it was referring to the cars (not the drivers) and it has stuck around as a rude way to refer to heavily modded Asian cars.

It doesn’t hold the same sort of derogatory connotations in the Unix world, largely because most users aren’t even aware of where it comes from. It just refers to a highly customized Unix setup.