pitaa

Art Bell was one of a kind. Out there, but a mostly harmless lovable breed of crazy.

> The customers will tell Amazon they never received the items. Amazon will replace them free.

Why does this remind me of that old Firefly episode where they steal the medicine from the Alliance hospital. They justify that "the Alliance will have it replaced by the end of the day".

I still see getting your viewers over to patreon being the most difficult part. No matter how many times you plug a patreon in your YouTube videos, only a small percent of viewers are going to follow the link.

I can't wait for more cheap movies while they burn through more venture capital!

> Perhaps for people who don't have a "hack the world!" mindset, it does appear as genius I suppose.

I think this is it. I've realized that as an engineer, I look at the local environment around me as a construct. If I don't like something or think it can be improved, I can redesign it better. Hell, I once got the traffic markings on an entire street changed by sending a single email to the right person pointing out something that annoyed me whenever I drove through that area.

I've realized that not everyone has this mindset though. So many people write things off as "just the way it is" without considering that they can be changed. Sure, YMMV. As an average Joe, I really don't have much power to change the tax code. But I do have a lot of control over my local environment.

I'm reminded of When I was teaching, I would occasionally hear students grumbling about the way their homework was being graded. But with enough time, you'll hear students grumbling about nearly everything, so I never paid it too much attention. I'd just check that the grader had followed the rubric, and then either make a grade correction if needed, or just tell the student that it had been graded accurately. After several years, I got a long-winded email from a student expressing their dissatisfaction with the way their assignments were being graded. But instead of solely complaining, this student explained _why_ they were upset and politely requested that I consider changing my rubric. After some discussion, I did just that. I didn't concede all their "demands", but I did make changes that made the students happy.

This was a student that understood that the class policies were a construct, and that a sincere discussion can be sufficient to incite change.

> I doubt the canal can or does charge ships based on their overall itinerary

You'd be wrong there! They actually have a rebate system[0] based on a number of factors including origin and destination. Basically, they try to make it so that its always cheaper to go through the canal, rather than sail around.

[0] https://www.wilhelmsen.com/ships-agency/suez-canal/suez-cana...

> the belt is industrial nylon (not plastic)

Last I checked, nylon was still a thermoplastic.

> does Hyundai make more than automobiles?

Much more. "It is the second largest South Korean chaebol or conglomerate, after Samsung Group, related to other Hyundai-name industries following a specialized development split and restructuring which resulted in Hyundai Motor group, Hyundai Heavy Industries Group, Hyundai Development Company Group, Hyundai Department Store Group, and Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance."[0]

They even build ships and oil rigs.

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

> It would imply that lifting the wheel after you've stopped releases that amount of energy (it seems to do so).

Notice, however, that the springs are actually missing when they show this in the video! Couple that with the fact that he rotates the wheel by hand to a certain position before setting it down, and its evident that the rotation we see is just due to a very imbalanced wheel.

I concur, and this smells of bullshit. Unfortunately they don't show inside their magic box, so I can't see whats happening on the inside. I did notice that the springs were completely missing on one of their demos in the video though!

So I've had some limited involvement university fee structures and their health clinics. I actually had a conversation with the director of one about these plans. He explained:

* The university already has the clinic that is funded by student fees and a bit from the university general fund

* Uninsured students are seen for free and just pay for supplies used ($10 for a lab test, $5 for an xray, etc)

* They wave all copays for students with outside insurance

* For students on the student insurance plan, they are expected to use the clinic for general/minor needs. In these cases, the university agrees to eat the cost and not bill the insurer.

So all the insurance company is paying is major medical expenses for services not rendered by the school. Its just like large companies that have an on site clinic to save on their premiums.

So technically, it does end up costing the school a bit more if students buy the insurance through them because the school pays for all the supplies that they would normally be reimbursed for. If more student use the clinic, the university will end up having to expend their budget. But in comparison to how much money the university already bleeds, the clinic is a pretty minor cost. I think the whole clinic costs less to run than they pay their athletic director.

One interesting side note was regarding students that have outside insurance. Many times, they don't even bother billing the insurance if its just an office visit. Because medical billing is such a mess, they realized that it was actually costing them money to pay someone to deal with it when the insurance will only pay them ~$40 anyway. So they'll only bother if there are additional procedures and they expect a reimbursement >$100.

Plus, by having a bug bounty program, it indicates that they're going to be reasonable and accepting of outside bug reports. In the absence of such a program, one can't be sure that a bug report isn't going to result in angry phone calls from tech-illiterate people accusing you of hacking them.

I recently found a compromised server on a university's network. I wasn't going to cold call them to report it because I had no idea how Betty answering the phones would react. Instead, I sent it to an IT contact that I knew personally. I knew that he didn't have anything at all to do with this, but that he would know who to get it to.

I don't remember where I first heard it, but I've always remembered the adage that if someone personally announces their resignation, it was likely their idea. If the company announces their resignation, they were likely forced out.

Yes, NCEES (the body that administers the Engineering licensing exams nationwide in the US) is discontinuing their Software Engineering exam next year because only ~80 people have taken it since it was created in 2013.

I think the biggest problem they had was that despite having the exam, not many states actually issue Professional Engineer licenses in the Software Engineering discipline. Because of this, I don't see why anyone (in those states) would bother taking the exam if they can't actually get a license and use the title "Professional Engineer".

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. I've had the same thing happen multiple times, also at a certain "major nationwide pharmacy." Interestingly, the smaller/more local pharmacies have never done this.

Unfortunately that article reads like a press release from "Renewlogy" and doesn't seem to have a complete basis in reality. In reality at present the area is facing a $900,000 increase in recycling costs largely because china isn't taking it anymore.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2018/06/26/curbside-...

How does anyone think it's a good idea to take out $1M in loans for an education? Yes, tuition costs are ridicules and in general students have no control over them. In general, I feel like students are taken advantage of. HOWEVER, students certainly can choose not to attend a certain school. If you choose to rack up $1M in debt, I feel like that's solely on you and your (obviously) poor decision making skills.

> advertisers should stop allowing online outrage to dictate where they advertise

I agree, but good luck convincing the Tide executives that its okay for their ad to play before a video of a KKK rally.

Furthermore, how do you even create a content platform that doesn't police content and not have it immediately attract scores of users that are only there because they were banned from everywhere else, thus turning your platform into a cesspool that the more mainstream users avoid? (see voat.co)

The real question here is what colleges are admitting kids that can't read or write? Is affirmative action really so strong that these colleges accepted every kid from a HS where the average SAT score is in the 16th percentile? Or did the high school also help the kids fudge their applications?

Some classes don't accept paper homework these days, everything is completed online- The textbook publishers have started selling access codes to online homework websites. So s physics professor might decide to use "MasteringPhysics" for all the homework in their class, so every student has to pay ~$100 for a access code (subscription) to that website.

The professors that use these systems like them because they don't have to grade anything. The departments like them because they don't have to pay graders and can have bigger classes. An the publishers LOVE them because students have no choice but to pay.

Accessing the material is becoming less and less of a problem, for all the reasons already stated - piracy, international editions, OER, etc. The real issue is that the textbook publishers know this and are pushing more and more access codes so it doesn't matter where you get the book, you still have to shell out $100 to be able to submit homework. I still haven't seen a good solution for this issue.

Tom Scott made a good video talking about this tech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCLaeBAkFAY

Unfortunately the zip code level is not always precise enough to determine local tax rates, but your point stands that it isn't usually overly difficult to find the tax rates for a particular shipping address.

I remember a few years back when I was doing ecommerce, I came across a service called TaxCloud[0] that was supposed to handle all of the tax collection for you, for free. I never actually used them, but the idea was you use their API to calculate tax rates for all your orders, you remit the tax to them and then they paid the states. Apparently many states offer a commission to 3rd parties that collect and remit owed taxes, so TaxCloud was supposed to be making their money that way.

[0] taxcloud.net

My "guess" has always been a bad taco truck (or the like). Something that maybe the locals are used to, but makes the Americans ill.

While sort of true, I've never seen any sort of tradeshow where the power is metered. Typically you just pay a flat rate for the number/size of hookups you need.

> nobody knows how many pants LL Bean is shipping to my zip code on December 4.

While making predictions of that resolution are not realistic, in general I would imagine that the shipping carriers are in a better position to estimate delivery volume in a certain area than the retailers would be. I would bet that overall volume can be predicted with decent accuracy using historical data.

I would bet there's more to it than just wanting "recognizable" trucks for residential deliveries. Using a box truck is less efficient because they don't typically have access to the box from the cab, so the driver has to get out and run around to open the door at each stop. But this isn't quite as big of an issue when they're doing commercial pickups/deliveries, because there's usually numerous packages at each stop, so getting out open the back isn't as much of a time sink per-package.

Agreed. I have effectively quit Facebook: I log on once a year to reconnect with people I never talk to anymore, and subsequently remember exactly why it is that I never talk to them anymore!

This surprised me. I thought the term "Comic-Con" was sufficiently genericized that the trademark would be unenforceable. While I'm familiar with comic con, I certainly wouldn't have been able to tell you that the only "officially licensed" event was in San Diego.

> Though restricting them from reading your content if those posts are in an official capacity is very questionable.

I think this is probably the biggest issue overall. If all of Trumps tweets were published on whitehouse.gov or in the Federal Register, I wonder if that might make this lawsuit irrelevant?

The EFF says "The president’s tweets are official statements and the public has a First Amendment right to receive them." But if you could read them in the Federal Register, wouldn't this claim be satisfied?