eigenvector

Anecdotally, Canada & US Amazon used to be like you described when they first started becoming the "everything" store but things have really declined lately.

6 or 7 years ago there was a much higher proportion of items actually sold by Amazon. Now it's a morass of third-party sellers with inaccurate listings to the point that even just finding an item is quite a choice. I recently gave up trying to buy kitchen knives because most listings had no OEM part number, a vague description and photo and people arguing in the Q&A section about basic features like whether it had a serrated edge or not.

Amazon has become a dumping ground for people who buy things on Alibaba, at liquidation or even just at Costco and try to resell for a markup. Even a search for basic consumer products like a box of cereal will have the top results be these kinds of sellers. For instance, I just searched for "ichiban noodles" (a popular international brand of instant noodles that can be found for <$1/each in any grocery store in Canada). The top result is a pack of 8 for $27!

Yes, Amazon still replaces or refunds almost anything that you have an issue with, but I'd rather just get the thing I wanted the first time.

A perfect of example of this is a picture frame I bought from Amazon (or rather, third party seller fulfilled by Amazon). It arrived damaged because it was thrown into a too-large box with no padding. I notified Amazon and they sent another one. It arrived identically packaged and also damaged. Then I asked for a refund. At this point, almost a month had passed and I still didn't have a picture frame, despite a huge amount of resources having been consumed by Amazon.

No store that actually has to bear the cost of returns themselves would do that, but Amazon made out like kings on the transaction: they got a cut of the original purchase, their FBA fees, then got to charge the seller for disposal of a broken item - twice!

Interac Online appears to have been deprecated by most major Canadian banks in favour of Visa Debit. My understanding is the Visa Debit cards issued by banks like TD and Scotia are dual-mode: transactions will be processed through the Interac network when possible, with the lower Interac fees applying, and through the Visa network otherwise.

I don't know if the merchant fees for Visa Debit are any different to using a Visa credit card.

This works conceptually if you are sustainably replanting forests to feed your paper mill. In reality, your mileage may very and here in Canada, plenty of paper mills are still running off of irreplaceable primary forest.

No, the tech in the infamous Steinway 'assault' incident was William Hupfer. Here's contemporary coverage of it in the New York Times: http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1960/12/07/9997...

Besides being a genius, Gould was also a notorious hypochondriac.

I'm an Indian diaspora person with no cultural connection to India.

When I travel, I'm often accosted by Indian (nationality) people who immediately begin 20 questions about my background, religion, caste, language, where my grandparents are from, et cetera.

One occurrence that sticks in my mind is being in a building lobby in Almaty, Kazakhstan and having two Indians see me from across the street, immediately cross the road and excitedly ask "Are you Indian?"

When I replied "No" and kept walking, they followed me for a block trying to decipher how an Indian-appearing person might not be Indian.

Mostly I find this amusing and chalk it up to cultural differences. But I can't help but conclude that Indians are almost obsessed with "placing" each Indian-appearing person they mert based on their ancestry, and find it hard to move past this.

If I'm feeling annoyed, I'll say, "you wouldn't ask a white person any of this, so why are you asking me?"

The first year is $0 when you buy a new iPhone, so pro-rating wouldn't make a difference.

I often sign up for trials and immediately cancel (so I don't forget about them). That way it requires a positive action on my part to keep the subscription. That doesn't work if your access ends as soon as you cancel.

YouTube is as big of a purveyor of misinformation as Facebook. I just spent two hours yesterday dissecting all manner of coronavirus misinformation my mom learned from YouTube. The insidious aspect of it is that she never went looking for that - she started off watching legitimate sources like credible media outlets but autoplay took her further and further down the rabbit hole without even realizing she was no longer watching the same source. Outrageous, deliberately deceptive propaganda has weaponized the platform and Google is making billions shovelling that content to unsuspecting people. Everyone gets paid and society has to deal with the fallout of millions of misinformed citizens during a global pandemic.

Respectfully, there's plenty to fix in your own house and you as a Googler have 1,000 times more of a voice to push for change than the average person.

What happened?

The power grid must not only have sufficient generation capacity to match load, it needs some extra - called spinning or operating reserve. This ensures security - the characteristic where the grid is resilient to any single failure. Because load is not normally controlled (i.e. people can turn loads on and off without permission from the system operator), the system needs to be able to respond to that as well as contingencies like a line or generator trip.

Imagine, for instance, that you're fully maxed out on generation with no reserve, and one generator trips offline. You will now need to trigger emergency load shedding very, very rapidly (within seconds) to arrest frequency decline and a cascading, wide-area outage.

So you carry a margin of operating or spinning reserve, essentially generation that is available to very quickly ramp its output up or down in response to system conditions. When that margin starts to get eaten away by lack of capacity, you can do controlled load shedding, where you remove loads that have been already marked as low-priority to get some of your margin back. By doing this, you can avoid uncontrolled load shedding, which would have worse consequences.

Official notice from CAISO:

---------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: 202002424 POSTED: 2020-08-14 18:38:00 ---------------------------------------------------------------- CAISO Grid STAGE 3 System Emergency Notice [202002424]

The California ISO hereby issues a CAISO Grid Stage 3 System Emergency Notice effective 08/14/2020 at 18:36 through 08/14/2020 at 23:59.

Reason: California ISO is Reserve Deficient.

Refer to the ISO System Emergency Fact Sheet (http://www.caiso.com/Documents/SystemAlertsWarningsandEmerge...) for additional detail.

The ISO requires load curtailments, use of Interruptible Loads* and requests Out-of-Market (OOM) and Emergency Energy from all available sources. Maximum conservation efforts are requested.

Spinning Reserves have depleted or are forecast to deplete to levels below minimum requirements. Load curtailments are required and will continue until such time as sufficient Spinning Reserves are available.

Monitor system conditions on Today's Outlook (http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx) and check with local electric utilities for additional information.

http://www.caiso.com/informed/Pages/Notifications/AWENoticeL...

Your comment is completely correct in general, but I'll add that based on the information released by CAISO for this incident, it appears to have been caused by insufficient generation capacity to meet demand at the state level, not constraints on specific transmission or distribution circuits.

CAISO declared insufficient operating reserve (the generation capacity that is available to quickly ramp up or down to match load and generation), which forced them to drop load to get back within safe operating margins. It's better to do this than let the system get into an insecure state where a forced outage may cause cascading failures.

---------------------------------------------------------------- NOTICE: 202002424 POSTED: 2020-08-14 18:38:00 ---------------------------------------------------------------- CAISO Grid STAGE 3 System Emergency Notice [202002424]

The California ISO hereby issues a CAISO Grid Stage 3 System Emergency Notice effective 08/14/2020 at 18:36 through 08/14/2020 at 23:59.

Reason: California ISO is Reserve Deficient.

Refer to the ISO System Emergency Fact Sheet (http://www.caiso.com/Documents/SystemAlertsWarningsandEmerge...) for additional detail.

The ISO requires load curtailments, use of Interruptible Loads* and requests Out-of-Market (OOM) and Emergency Energy from all available sources. Maximum conservation efforts are requested.

Spinning Reserves have depleted or are forecast to deplete to levels below minimum requirements. Load curtailments are required and will continue until such time as sufficient Spinning Reserves are available.

Monitor system conditions on Today's Outlook (http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx) and check with local electric utilities for additional information.

Sure, if you run the tap the entire time that you're hand-washing. But you can just fill the sink with water, plug it and wash many dishes with that water. I once worked with a guy who lived in a cabin without running water for most of his life. Needless to say, he was very efficient at hand washing dishes with very little water.

You may want to consider a simple detachable hose you can connect to the faucet to fill up something external when the sink is full. I use such a thing for filling a bucket of water that can't actually fit in the sink. You will find it in your local hardware store.

I work in the power generation industry. We have a lot of primary/secondary as well primary/standby systems.

The cardinal rule is - test everything. Test it when you install and commission it, test it when part of the system changes, test it periodically during maintenance shutdowns, test it when you have a convenient time to do so without losing production (such as an outage to a different system that necessitates your system being offline).

Test components individually - at the factory and in the field - and test systems end-to-end.

Test with the most adverse possible conditions, not the most optimal. Test beyond your normal operating envelope.

When I participate in design reviews as a maintenance engineer my primary line of inquiry is: how will I test this stuff during operations? Has it been designed in a way that makes testing impossible without an expensive outage? Can workers safely gain access to components that need routine testing without having to de-energize other, unrelated parts of the system?

Now not every industry has the budget available to test to the extent that we do. But even in our industry, I often see a penny-wise, pound-foolish approach of "assume this thing works perfectly from the factory then act surprised years later when an abnormal condition occurs and it fails".

If something was not tested, it may not work. It might be for a very simple reason (like mis-configuration of a single setting during installation) or a very complex reason. But either way, wouldn't the company rather know their equipment doesn't work -before- putting it into service than after?

Isn't deprecated actually correct here?

It means the feature still works, but will be removed in the future or is no longer supported. There also be may a new implementation of it that the developer would like you to use, hence the warning that it's deprecated.

Depreciation implies a rate of change over time, which isn't the case. Today we deprecate feature X, and in two years we plan remove it. It never depreciates.

> You're talking about three different classes of device: PCs, phones, and IoT (IoS)/deep embedded.

Not really, Google applies the same disposable approach to supporting ChromeOS on bog-standard x86 hardware. I have an x86 Chromebox that Google suddenly dropped all support for - including security patches - with a generic message that "your device is out of its support window". This basically rendered it useless as a ChromeOS device, because you can't browse the public web with an unpatched web browser. Yet I can run up-to-date Linux in Crouton.

I don't see how this is technically any different than Microsoft deciding to stop all Windows 10 patches on PCs older than a certain age not because of any blocking compatibility issue, but just because they've passed a certain age threshold and they don't want to do it anymore.

I used to evangelize ChromeOS as a great, simple solution for non-technical users who just want to browse the web without the hassle of maintaining a full-fledged PC, but I won't do that if Chrome devices are part of the smartphone "time based support model" rather than the "compatibility based support" model we've had on PCs for decades. A PC for basic use can easily last 10 years, OEMs who arbitrarily shorten that are not helping their customers.

That reminds me of the time I found an appropriately shaped bolt installed in a fuse-holder - presumably someone did not have a replacement fuse and improvised.

Except that it had been 5 years since the last maintenance in this place and it was a protection panel for a large synchronous generator in a power plant.

After you make a heroic temporary fix, please, ensure the permanent fix is applied later!

One of the biggest reasons portable air conditioners exist is for apartments. It's something anyone can buy without having to get permission from their landlord to make modifications to the property. So I would not compare them directly to anything that cannot be installed by a tenant without additional permission.

Ordinarily when you pay $350 for headphones it is assumed that the vendor has already invested money in doing R&D to make them work properly and isn't planning to do testing on you without telling you or compensating you for it, to enable the functionality you already paid for.

I bought headphones, I did not sign up for a research project.

We went from paying for software to getting it for free in return for our data and now we're apparently giving over our data even for physical devices that we pay top dollar for.

Parent comment said 'the West', not America.

Public transportation and affordable healthcare are the norm in most highly developed Western democracies such as the UK, France, Sweden, etc.

Many things in electrical and building codes aren't that risky to break one at a time, but they all contribute to safety by eliminating possible hazards.

You're right that temporary protective grounding protects power workers from inadvertent energization, but that is primarily to protect from sources of hazardous energy that can't be isolated (like lightning or induction from parallel lines). Temporary grounding can fail too (improper application, bad jumper, an accident severs the earth connection after the job begins, etc) so we provide multiple levels of protection instead of relying on just one thing to keep people safe.

Electrical systems need to be stupid proof because although you might be smart, the next person who comes along won't be. I agree that improper use of a home generator is unlikely to injure someone, but the job as electrical engineers is to think of unlikely but hazardous things and prevent them from happening.

Or a small lithium battery to supply the necessary current which is already a thing you can buy on Amazon for $80 and will start any vehicle short of an excavator.

I drive one every day that is owned by my employer and I'm amazed how many people fork over $50,000 plus the higher running costs just to utilize the truck features once or twice a year, if that.

You can rent a truck for a day when you need it and save a lot of money and emissions.

You could use it power a house the same way you can with any generator - using a double male end extension cord.

The reason you can't find such a cord at Home Depot is that it's dangerous and a generator should only be connected to a home electrical panel through a transfer switch that prevents paralleling it with the utility supply.

It would also be more economical to install a stationary generator or battery system for emergency power.

Our propensity as a society to buy garbage quality new stuff rather than good quality used stuff is frustrating.

Tech savvy folks know they can find a fully competent, user-serviceable used computer for basic use on eBay for under $200, but Joe Blow goes to Walmart or Best Buy and only has the choice of a crappy $300 computer or a good $1000 computer, both new.

The impact on the environment alone of trashing or recycling things that can be refurbished and reused is staggering.

I run Windows 10 on a Dell Latitude E6400 from 2008 with a 1st gen Core 2 Duo & 4GB RAM and it runs fine.

Memory hungry apps like Chrome slow down pretty quick, but the OS itself is snappy.

I just put 8 GB of RAM and an SSD in a mid-2010 Macbook Pro for a friend. The parts were free, but could be purchased for $100. Perfectly usable machine for web browsing and entertainment. It won't run Catalina, but who cares?

> Ideally an acoustical consultant would be brought in during the design stage (just like SREs should be brought in during the design phase of a new service and not 5 minutes before it goes live), but that almost never happens, as we see (well hear) here.

Noise studies by qualified acoustical engineers are the rule not the exception in many jurisdictions.[1] But these only go so far, because the model of the predicted noise emissions from the as-yet-unbuilt turbine is only so detailed.

For what it's worth, no matter how much engineering you do there are always people who think they can hear something that can't be measured and won't be convinced otherwise.

On the other hand, a thing that really does reduce complaints is paying a community dividend to everyone who lives nearby (instead of just paying the owners of the actual land under the turbines).

[1] https://www.ontario.ca/page/noise-guidelines-wind-farms

Yes, because an electric parking meter uses only a few watts of electricity and may not even be connected to the grid (the most common ones I've seen just have a tiny solar panel). A electric vehicle charger may use 200 kW and require its own dedicated transformer. A fast charger is a fairly substantial cabinet. Now you're jackhammering the sidewalk to bring an underground electrical service to that spot.

Parent comment said "no dedicated parking space" which is a different thing. When I lived in Toronto, I had a resident permit issued by the city to park on the street on same block as my building, but I was at the mercy of whatever space was available. Some days I'd get a spot right in front of my building, some days I had to walk around the corner. This is a pretty common parking scenario in dense, older areas - there is no dedicated parking lot and the space you are parking on is part of the public realm.

What prevents me from stamping "Walmart at 123 Example Avenue" then scrawling an incomprehensible signature on any photo I want? The stamps the shops use don't have any security features to them.

Unlike the old "guarantor" system where a licensed professional or public official (judge, lawyer, doctor, etc.) had to sign your application - basically, people who the government could verify the existence of and hold accountable - there's not very much traceability to the photo system.

The first example in the article isn't particularly insightful, since America also has train quiet cars that are somewhat notorious for how seriously they're taken.

https://fortune.com/2014/09/17/amtrak-quiet-car/