Domenic_S

> It could have introduced for example a limit on grant overhead on all future grants

So exactly what they introduced, except not applying to current grants?

> forced universities find saving in admin/sports etc.

Aren't sports a net money generator for universities?

Let's not pretend that the taxi situation was hunkey-dory before big-bad-tech came onto the scene. There's no regulation that says if I call dispatch to request a taxi one has to show up, and "we'll pick you up when we pick you up" was (and is still) a common mode of operation.

In NYC, it was (is?) against the law to hail a black car on the street, even if they were sitting there ready willing and able to drive you, because the taxi cartel got _regulations_ to make it that way.

Sounds like it's an 802.11 monitor mode packet sniffer, recording probe requests (which have a MAC address associated with them). Connecting to the internet is probably just to hook up to their cloud service.

Defeatable by airplane mode/wifi off/phone off, sure.

I feel seen. I can't stand drywall work - although I'll do a patch'n'texture that's too small to hire out if i absolutely have to. The folks who do drywall for a living are magicians that can knock out the job 5x faster than me, and 20x better. I'll pay all day.

Electrical on the other hand I find to be a blast. It's more a hobby than a chore, although there are some things I won't touch, like running conduit for lv or installing a sizable solar system. The pros are just so good at it.

Cars too - I'll change every fluid, do brake jobs, install short shift kits, dashcams, even got a windows VM running so I could use old software to read OBD-I codes on my old car. But timing or a top-end rebuild.. I leave that to the pros.

I think there's something to be said for doing like 80% of the things yourself even when you can afford more. It's so gratifying to do even a simple job and when it's done, it's done. It's so unlike most of our day-to-day that's full of multi-month efforts that depend on other people.

I once stumbled upon what I thought was a car show, but was actually an exhibition of miniature engines (!). Is this a thing? It seems really interesting and I'd love to build a miniature engine with my kids someday.

It just sucks. I get non-deterministic reactions from "turn off the lights" vs "turn off every light" vs "all lights off".. one of those phrases eventually works. I had to set up a custom action ("goodnight") to reliably do the thing.

If they focused on getting voice control for home automation perfect, it could be a real winner.

pptm.js is paypal's tag manager, for "Marketing Solutions". Gives the vendor shopper insights (clickthru, etc).

Stripe recommends putting stripe.js on every page to help detect fraud better (https://docs.stripe.com/js/including)

Small appliance repair is/used to be a thing, remember TV repair shops? Vacuum repair shops I still see around occasionally.

Problem is people buy a $25 hamilton beach blender that doesn't make any financial sense to repair but makes huge amounts of sense as an initial purchase. If you buy a $500 vitamix, you can keep it running forever with new parts, but that's the same price as 20 of the cheap blender. And blender technology isn't really advancing at a huge rate compared to, say, cell phones.

A large company I work for declined to buy licenses from a supplier that had this clause. From my understanding it's not really legal - or at worst it's a gray area - but the language is just too risky if you're not looking to be the test case in court.

It's the typical case for Bay Area-HQ tech companies, at essentially all levels for Tier-1 companies, higher levels at Tier-2/3 companies, and specialist roles beyond that.

"software engineering" doesn't print money any more than being "in finance" does, you'll make more or less depending on what company you do it for.

I have kids, my older is 11 and reads almost whenever she can. She loves to read herself to sleep at night.

We've taken her to the library since she was a baby where we'd find new baby books to read to her. Over time, we stopped picking out books for her and let her wander the isles, picking whatever seemed interesting to her. She usually chooses a wide assortment of things from comics to YA fiction.

My son is much more interested in screens, but he still reads a lot. Whenever we restrict the screens his next default is to read.

We read a lot to both of them as infants & toddlers. We have a couple bookshelves worth of books in the house, but honestly they spend almost their whole reading time on new-to-them library books. We've hit the library checkout limit pretty much every time we go! And it's no waste - every book is returned read.

> if you have a kid who doesn't have an existing strong reading habit, how do you find books they'd be interested in?

I'd start by taking them to the library and letting them explore. Chances are they'll find something that interests them!

Sort of. The Stabilization Act of 1942 (act of Congress) authorized FDR's Executive Order 9328 [0], which was a price/wage stabilization Order meant to keep the economy stable during WWII.

Because companies could no longer compete via wages, they began competing with fringe benefits -- health insurance being chief among them. It's been that way ever since.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942

> average consumer is with their health insurance provider for about 3 years

Are they? That sounds right for how long they're with an employer, but if I move companies I'm probably going with the same insurance carrier under the new company's plan. The total list of carriers [0] is pretty dang small (and not every licensed company is doing new policies).

Even if what you say is true it seems like reciprocity would make up for it - Company A pays and Company B benefits like you say, but for every situation like that there's a situation where Company B pays and Company A benefits.

[0] https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/110-health/20-look...

What keeps someone from driving across the border to acquire one, or ordering on ebay, or getting one at a sketchy shop? "Some idiot" is exactly the kind of person that would ignore the law.

I mean it seems like a fine law, but it's a law so now I never have to think about it again seems strange to me. Running stop signs is outlawed but I still look before I cross the street.

What country? I'm seeing $12/mo for turbo and $14/mo for YT Premium

I literally meant south of huntsville as in, draw an E-W line on the map at huntsville, and look everywhere south that's still within ontario.

2.5 hour commute sucks and wouldn't be long-term sustainable, but if it's what you'd have to do to get into housing it's something to consider. I know; that was my commute when I bought my first place in the bay area. I did it long enough to build equity & sweat equity, then used the profit to buy closer to work.

Correct! I had an @x.com email address when I worked at PayPal a long time ago.

I dunno what qualifies as south ON, but I see 144 houses for sale from $50-300 CAD south of Huntsville.

Your point however is (less charitably) put as "I can't purchase a house where I want the house to be, with the specs that I want", which is different than not being able to afford any house anywhere.

My parents also purchased a house with modest income when I was young. But it had fraying electrical (knob & tube!), peeling paint, 1 bathroom, no A/C, a wood-burning fireplace for heat, and was 45 minutes from where they had rented/liked to live. The place had its charms, they put sweat equity into it for many years, and I think of it fondly - but it was still a huge compromise, and by today's strict lending standards was probably not even able to be financed based on hazards alone. I am sure they would have preferred to purchase a house with bay windows overlooking the ocean like they had been renting, but they could afford something that was inland and needed a lot of work. I do not think they were unique in this way - I wager a lot of 'my parents bought a house in the 80s, dad was an artisanal pencil sharpener and mom was a ferret breeder' stories are actually more like this one.

My point is, I am by default unconvinced when an otherwise seemingly successful person says they can't afford to buy, even in an expensive place like Toronto or SF. As far as I can tell it just means they haven't lowered their standards enough yet. I have compromised on every home I've bought; in fact I entered the market a lot later than I should have because as a first-timer I wasn't ready to compromise enough. That probably cost me half a mill in appreciation over the years.

> I get paid more than my non tech peers yet still functionally have less spending power than a 25 year old from 30 years ago

This seems like some non-generic case specific to your situation and not representative of the average experience.

The median income in 1994 for over-25-year-olds (men only!) was $25,465 [0], women was less than half of that. Let's go with the figure for men for the sake of discussion.

$25,465 in 1994 is the buying power of $55k today [1]. $55k is the 56th percentile [2], so right where we'd expect it to be.

---

1994: median home price $142,200 [3], interest rate 30-year fixed: 8.38% [4]

Principal balance $113,760 @ 8.38%, payment (P&I): $865, or 3.4% of annual income

---

2024: median home price $384,500 [5], interest rate 30-year fixed: 7% [6]

Principal balance $307,600 @ 7%, payment (P&I): $2,046, 3.7% of annual income

---

Opinion incoming: I think there are 2 things that make 'today' seem more expensive than 'back then': implacable consumerism, and the natural change of places over time (ie, gentrification & co).

w/r/t consumerism, the load on both 'necessary' and discretionary spending has increased big-time - people were not generally paying for broadband, smartphones, gaming consoles, home espresso machines, soundbars, portable speakers, media players, printers/copiers/scanners, I could go on forever. Look around you and count how many things straight-up didn't exist in 1994 (or were reserved for the ultrawealthy or for business). We could do without them today, but it would feel really bad, as if we're not participating in society or making use of its advancement.

w/r/t gentrification, many places today are more desirable than they used to be, and their increase in price is a function of demand rather than of inflation, so it feels like the economics of living got away from people who weren't already bought in. But it's not that "everything" got so much more expensive, it's that, for example, Akron OH used to be more expensive than San Jose (!!) because farming was the center of industry. Now the world changed and what used to be a pretty rural town full of fruit trees is the most expensive metro in the country. It's not because "houses got more expensive" per se, it's that the world changed.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t376.asp

[1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=25%2C465&year1...

[2] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

[3] https://www.huduser.gov/periodicals/ushmc/winter2001/histdat...

[4] https://www.mpamag.com/us/mortgage-industry/guides/historica....

[5] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/existing-home-sales/

[6] https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/mortgage-interest-rates-f...

seems like they should have turned left and tried to go under the middle section there instead of cranking all the way around right. I imagine they were under task saturation with the power outages though.

I'm sure $38k of that $40k was the armored car contract, which is insane for such small amounts - less than $500/week.

I'm kind of stunned they didn't have any random entrance employee run a bag down to the bank once a week/month. Send them home an hour early to do it. It's what we used to do in retail, banks have unattended drops for use 24/7.

From another article:

> "They seek no monetary award," he said, adding that "Children’s Health Defense is financially backing the lawsuit."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/experience/national-pa...

> Theyre still using python 2 and centOS in tons of systems.

There's 1 service on py2, with a plan to migrate because of the move off of centos. centos deprecation is in progress.

Your unstated assumption is that universal agreement is required for universal morals to exist

Is that really what you think I said? How about making a point with less snark to it that I could respond to?

> The first thing is that there are no universal sets of morals.

That's a belief presented as fact. I'm not super excited about getting into a philosophical debate, but just something to consider:

"The rules: help your family, help your group, return favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect others’ property, were found in a survey of 60 cultures from all around the world." -- https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2019-02-11-seven-moral-rules-found...

No, you're looking at old data. Cat thefts in 2023 halved compared to 2022.

https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/catalytic-converter-th...

> counseling, a better home and school environment, food in the belly, and so on might.

This seems right for preventing criminals from forming out of otherwise-blank-slate children, but what do you do with these kids? There's no magic wand that turns their home & school life right.

On the other hand, there are plenty of kids who had a perfectly fine and financed upbringing who turned into criminals and terrors, they just tend toward white-collar crime.

This brings us full circle to the original comment that religion used to serve a useful purpose for society that's been largely lost -- a set of ethics & morals, and if those don't take real well there's always the all-seeing entity watching you at all times. In modern times the all-seeing eye of God has been replaced by surveillance cameras, but what is the base of morals replaced by?

An uncited claim in a summary paper.

The CDC recommends not using THC vapes at all because of EVALI, but make no such recommendation about standard nicotine vapes (unless you've never smoked) [0].

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/basic_information/e-cigarettes/s...

Sure you do. Smoke and walk around in public. Smoke and stand in the middle of the sidewalk. etc