toomanybeersies

Cigarette filters are basically ineffective at reducing the incidence of cancer [1][2]. They're more or less just a placebo for cancer prevention.

When people started realising how bad smoking was in the 50's, the tobacco companies started manufacturing filtered cigarettes, which had the appearance of being less harmful. They even added extra chemicals to make used filters appear darker than they otherwise would, so that they appeared to be filtering more effectively [3].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9241071/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/6601565

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3088411/

You don't even really need to tile your yard with solar panels. Depending on location, you could be self-sufficient(ish) with 10 kW of solar, 25kWh of batteries, and a 10 kVA generator for cloudy weeks.

Total cost is around $40k.

However, unless you're rural or somewhere with poor grid reliability it's probably not worth the expense of being off-grid. Generally speaking, due to generous feed-in tariffs you would be (financially) better off staying connected to the grid than spending the additional money required to handle periods of cloudy weather.

> He who does not work does not eat

That was Lenin who wrote that, although it was originally from the Bible.

Useful if you need to tow a trailer. Otherwise it's just a novelty.

Anecdotally, most of the music I heard when I was travelling in South America wasn't American music. Same thing with South East Asia.

Look at the Billboard (or equivalent) charts for Germany, France, Argentina, or any other non-Anglo country; maybe 10% of the entries are English language or from American artists.

Depends on where you live I suppose. Due to the risk of causing bushfires, fireworks are banned in most of Australia.

Machine guns were commonly used in an indirect fire role during the First World War, as the parabolic trajectory allowed machine gunners to target soldiers in trenches.

Now I assume most people aren't using firearms chambered in .303 or another full-size rifle cartridge, but there's obviously various combinations of calibre + azimuth where shooting into the air is dangerous.

In the case of the US, shooting people isn't even considered "misuse" of a firearm. The USA is the only developed country where it's socially and legally acceptable for civilians to own and carry firearms for the specific purpose of shooting people (ostensibly in self defence).

It's probably not from prepaid SIM ID checks. Telcos are forbidden from retaining your passport/drivers licence details after your identity has been verified [1].

[1] https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2017L00399 (Section 6.4)

Fire extinguishers are easier to carry than a dumbbell. They're a tall cylinder with a handle at the top.

Imagine the money they'd make if they turned Buckingham Palace into a hotel.

The king is paid from earnings generated by the Crown Estate [0], which is basically a state owned property investment fund. From my understanding, taxpayer money hasn't been used to fund the monarchy since the 1700s.

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

Ironic that they've been fined by the Irish DPC, considering that Ireland has been the key enabler of FB/Meta's tax avoidance for years.

First thing that comes to mind is the big list of tech industry position descriptions from the Australian Information Industry Association [1]. Not sure how good they are since I haven't actually had a proper read of any myself.

[1] https://www.aonhumancapital.com.au/getmedia/9b5d9f13-294f-46...

I've always gone with señor developer myself.

The NodeJS alpine base image is only 40 MB.

At least (I hope) you weren't still using Bower.

> along with companies like Nintendo

The western equivalent would probably be Nokia, which was founded in 1865 as a paper manufacturer.

> because capitalism favors maximizing profit and considering tolerances too wide as an expense.

Lack of foresight isn't exclusive to capitalism. Would socialist data centres be built to handle temperatures several degrees above the highest ever recorded temperature?

Even in a socialist economy, building systems with an excessively high tolerances would be seen as a poor allocation of resources.

It could be equally argued that capitalism favours private companies like Google ensuring their DCs are as fault tolerant as possible, to ensure they have a competitive advantage. There's also plenty of cases where companies sell unnecessary and excessive goods and services to maximise their own profit.

> and being done with it potentially forever if its made to be repairable/upgradeable

DC cooling systems are repairable and upgradable. They're a far cry from a residential split system AC unit.

I have the opposite feelings about menthols; I can't stand them. Whenever I smoke a menthol I feel like I'm smoking a toothbrush.

I'm a full time smoker, but I'll turn down a menthol if offered one. I'd rather suffer through nicotine cravings than subject myself to a Colgate coffin nail.

Netflix has a great international catalogue, and unlike torrented content, it's all reasonably well subtitled.

However, their English language catalogue gets worse by the day.

Funnily enough, there are quite a few Australian (and a few Kiwi) companies in the telematics space these days. Not sure how many of them are designing hardware from scratch though, versus off the shelf devices with custom firmware.

Wouldn't there the small matter of a few meters of concrete attenuating any signals coming from a nuclear facility?

> I won't be surprised if even the power connection becomes a future (unintended) means of data transmission.

That's already a thing. From the same author as the TFA, PowerHammer [1] exfiltrates data using current flow fluctuations. There's also Powermitter [2] (from some researchers at Wuhan University), which is exfiltration via power supply EMF leakage.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.04014.pdf

[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8300280

> why don’t more countries attack, say Costa Rica, which doesn’t even have a military?

Because of the Monroe Doctrine [1], which has been applied in some form or another for the past couple of hundred years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine

This is basically the origin of the M16 rifle, in its original incarnation as the 7.62mm chambered AR-10. The original prototypes were designed and built by Eugene Stoner and half a dozen other people in basically a garage.

They're almost the standard in New Zealand. I've also seen pozisquare screws around, which can be driven with both pozi and square bits.

> or crescent spanners as they are known here

I presume you're a Kiwi?

Over in Australia they call them shifters. One of the many tiny culture shocks I had when I moved across the ditch was when I asked someone to hand my crescent and they passed my Crescent brand pliers instead.

Disclaimer: I'm not a tax consultant, check with your accountant

If they don't have an ABN, they'll need to give you "Statement by a Supplier" [1], otherwise you're required to withhold tax at the top marginal rate.

[1] https://www.ato.gov.au/forms/statement-by-a-supplier-not-quo...

> sometimes via the expectation that you commit to the git repository from start to finish

Just rewrite your git history and fudge the commit timestamps. It's not even dishonest, it's just demonstrating your experience with Git.

Of course, that doesn't work if they expect you to push to Github/lab as you go.