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There are a lot of never-maskers out there, but I’d say that I’ve seen at least an order of magnitude increase in general usage even years after the lock downs and mandate have been lifted.

And, unlike engineers in manufacturing whose deep-pocket corporations bought an exemption, Engineers in the A/E/C field are licensed. And if you screw up you can lose your ability to work in your field…forever.

Wage is worthless wording. Most ultra rich don’t have wages - at least not relative to their change in worth. We need to change how taxes fundamentally work.

But, also, this describes every response to a ML prompt.

I had nothing to do with it, damnit.

TBF, if you’re really, really good at throwing feces, civilization sounds like a poor way to maximize the value of your skill. 🫤

You could say the same for a finite element model. A junior engineer with just 4 years of training can solve, explicitly, the deflection at the center of a slender, simple-simple beam of prismatic section and produce an exact (if slightly incorrect) answer. Building a FEM of the same can solve the problem and take longer (to make the model) with similar accuracy, both of which are good enough for design work.

Only a fool wouldn’t have a FEM around though, as it can solve problem that would take centuries for a human to solve. They may as well make a cartoon with the child digging a 3” hole in beach sand and then showing a backhoe making a jagged edged hole of the same size.

Baboo?!

I’m pretty sure that middle bit is like a springform pan. The handle is not solid - you squeeze it to make it sit in the waffle maker but when you remove it, it opens a bit to release. I have no room for this in my kitchen but am intensely intrigued. I might buy a new house so I can get a bigger kitchen and have a place for this.

I’ve yet to find a modern use for usenet as I’m not in the habit of downloading everything as it comes out, nor of looking for content within a few days of release. Often I’m looking for 2-5 year old content or back catalog, and usenet has been a uniform landscape of incompletes, even with two blocks on independent providers (or they were when I bought the data blocks).

[Raises hand]

I don’t have time to fuck with managing a seedbox to make ratios and community participation bullshit (looking at you, abt). I don’t even have time to fight incompletes on a usenet block. Let me drop a Benjamin in your “donation” box every couple of years and I’ll cover part of the server as long as I can find what I need, when I want it, in the quality I’m looking for.

I have subscriptions to a few of the big boys through legal cross-marketing deals; it’s still better to know that my shows will be waiting for me on my server if and when I ever get around to watching them.

If I spend half an hour to find an implement a workaround (because finding ways around YT’s advertising is not my hobby) then I’d have to watch 60 unskippable 30 second ads to break even, every single time they upgrade their cat-and-mouse. I don’t watch that much youtube in a month, probably not in 3 months.

As if it doesn’t when you input it for other sources? I haven’t had a single issue I can trace to Temu specifically. I get my Thai slave-mill “found your number in my phone” or “are you available for dinner” scam text once every other day regardless. Xfinity has probably sold, or lost, my information to dark web resellers more times than I can count. Heck, I get an email every couple of weeks from one of the “free” credit monitoring subscriptions I’ve been given thanks to breaches at Equifax, OPM, Chase, etc. that my email - the one I’ve had for 30 years come this spring - has been “found” on the dark web. No fucking shit; I’ll bet the have my password from 1995, too. I’d worry about it but I have far more pressing things in my life - like making sure I’m not overheating the queso I just put in the microwave.

Temu is the current loss leader. You have to be careful as there are some items more expense than the Amazon or Aliexpress options, but many are 1/2-2/3 of the Amazon price with free shipping. Most items are 7-10 days shipping, but Amazon (to a rural address) is barely a couple days better with prime and about on par without.

Shipping has pretty much killed Aliexpress for me. I’m not willing to buy anything expensive as it’s effectively impossible to return and most sellers have an Amazon sellers account that is the same price or less once intl shipping is added.

11. When you die at the palace, you really die at the palace
12. Try the mulled wine
13. It’s good to be the king
14. A gentleman’s cuffs should be even with the tip of his penis
15. Jews can joke about whatever they want if they’re the scriptwriter

Re: reasonable levels - You can have fail safe or fail secure. Those are two mutually exclusive options. Locking people out of content, whether it be consumers or a partner organization (like a theater) is the price of security (fail secure).

There is no condition where mild DRM is valuable to anyone. For consumers it constitutes a hurdle to use of content they have purchased without hindering non-purchased copies from being reproduced and distributed. No DRM allows the latter; unbreakable DRM ensures the former will be substantially affected at some point.

Mostly. If your locality is served by Amtrak - and only a few dozen cities are out of the 3 million square miles of ConUS - then it can be somewhat convenient and cost effective if you plan your travel more than 2-3 months in advance. It’s about 2/3 the speed of car travel, but more comfortable, generally. If you buy tickets less than 3 weeks ahead the prices are about 4x what they are for booking at 3-6 months out. Also, unless you live in one of the 2-3 hub areas, trains run only once or twice a day. For comparison, Last time I checked it’s like £70 to go from London to Aberdeen and takes 7 hours and trains leave every hour or two. From Roanoke to New York - 80 miles closer than the UK route I know of - it’s $200, 9 hours, and only two trains run per day - the first departs at 6:20am, the second at 4:15p (and gets in around 2am). It’s only a 7.5 hour drive and $40-50 in gas to go from Roanoke to NYC, and it’s pretty easy to park outside the city and take a commuter train in.

Oh, and there’s no workable hub and spoke system due to the few trains and long travel times. My daughter is just 300 miles away at school and the city has a train stop. It’s a 5 hour drive one way. It takes two days and 3 train changes to get from her city to the closest station to me, about a 45 minute drive away. It’s ridiculous.

Yeah, US is a real backwater when it comes to data - availability, privacy, you name it. Heck, my ISP will let me install for free, but I either have to buy my own modem or pay them $15/mo to rent one of theirs. I technically get wifi roaming with the company I use, but it’s rarely useful. I won’t torrent without a VPN; my ISP is a hardass for torrenting.

There are decent plans in some areas in the big cities in the US, but outside of that it’s pretty bleak…and there’s a lot of “outside of the cities” in the US.

Knowing who your provider is would (might) help. Xfinity has a 1TB or 1.2TB soft cap, which you can exceed once or twice a year without concern. Beyond that you fall into their top (I think it’s) 1% of users and may be asked to scale back or to pay an excess usage fee (which was non-trivial the last time I looked - something like $10/50GB).