FTA:

The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

So, yeah, almost certainly illegal in pretty much any grid-powered home in the US.

The basic problem is that if the grid power goes down the inverter can back-feed the grid enough to electrocute the people who are working to fix it.

Utilities require an approved isolation system of some kind that prevents that happening. They are pretty strict about this for various other technical and political reasons too, but evidently it is mostly a safety concern.

I’ve got some good locations at home for panels, and about 500W in panels that I use for camping, but the equipment I’d need to handle easily and safely consuming the power at home is kind of expensive (just running an inverter and a battery for an isolated system is easy enough, I’ve got all that, but it’s not cheap to seamlessly connect it to my home power system). Would love to have a safe and approved system like what is described in the article.

It’s English, so it’s difficult to be wrong, but that phrase do be weird.

It is! I enjoy it, but I’ve mostly cut it out, along with a bunch of other foods, just to keep my calorie intake down. I try to only use it where I see it as a necessary component, like when making lattes or on breakfast cereal. Where in the past I might grab a giant glass of milk I now substitute water. Except with brownies, obviously.

That’s how our household was when the kids were little, 1 to 1.5 gallons a day. Now that they’ve moved out it’s more like a gallon a month.

It’s funny how much this varies from family to family. We never eat dinner before 9PM. Usually two meals per day, lunch at maybe 1PM and dinner between 9 and 10PM. We’re just doing desk-work though, so no extra calorie needs. If I’m doing physical stuff I’ll usually add a light breakfast.

I was curious if that would work on ethernet cable! I’ve seen it done on coax, wasn’t sure if it would work well enough on UTP to be useful outside a lab setting. Cheap too. Cool!

Wire tracker maybe? You might want a higher quality version than that particular one if the cable run is long, one of the reviews suggest that the distance is limited.

Me either. However, I look forward to Legal Eagle breaking down the highlights.

I grew up playing World of Walmart

Me too! Good memories. It was better before they nerfed the produce department though.

huh, Windows still distributes a handful of .com programs. Neat.

I liked .com back in the day because it was easy to write assembly and dump it through the MSDOS ‘debug’ program to create an executable.

It’s not a bad plan if you can die of old age while the plates are still spinning.

If the defendant fails to show up the bondsman has to pay the court the entire amount

I’m curious, does the bondsman actually give the court cash, or just guarantee that they will if the defendant doesn’t show? And if that is the case, do they bond out more people than they actually have cash to cover, knowing that it is unlikely that they’ll ever have to cover all those positions?

That’s what I did, but it was the late 1990s so things were a bit different. Married with a kid, single-income household on the salary of a high school dropout. Fortunately for me the software industry was easy to get into back then and housing was cheaper. Funds were tight for a decade or so, but it’s gone well.

My kids all moved out in the past 5 years, skipped college and are living on their own with livable wages from jobs they like, more or less, and homes they own; one with kids, one renting their own place with a life-partner. Not having student loans helps, as does living in the forsaken US midwest where housing costs aren’t terrible (the tradeoff being that entertainment options can be more limited than closer to the coasts. A decent one bedroom apartment in a safe area is like $900, mortgage on a somewhat crappy medium-sized house like $1200, provided you got in on those sweet 3% mortgages).

There was a plan? Someone could have told me about that 40 years ago!

Seriously though, yeah, I guess. Not completely a traditional plan since I skipped the whole university and singles life part and instead went right to work, got married and had kids (which turned out great, kids all moved on to do their own stuff by the time I was 40, so now I have money and health at the same time, which would be pretty cool if I had some time).

TBH neither my partner nor I give a flying fuck about traditional anything, we just kinda do what sounds like fun and isn’t too likely to fuck things up for future us. Not a whole lot of long-term planning going on over here.

With a document disposal system having two options, ‘flush’ and ‘bury’.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s thumbthing weird about that image.

It doesn’t say ‘open with your thumb’. Open it with a knife or some other technique, then insert your thumb & lift.

It probably comes partly out of the social dynamic that causes the tendency to value men primarily by their usefulness rather than who they are personally. Feeling gets in the way of me getting shit done, earning money to support my family, etc., so I turn feelings off, mostly. I could turn them back on and learn to manage them and whatnot, but if that doesn’t make it easier for me to earn money, fix the house, etc., or worse, actively gets in the way of those things by taking more of my work time or making it harder for me to want to do those things, then I don’t have an incentive to be genuinely emotionally connected.

Also, evident confidence in one’s ability to handle shit helps to make dependents feel happier and safer, so experiencing uncertainty, fear, and other such emotions tends to act against one’s own interest in getting shit done and avoiding drama that distracts from shit getting done.

So yeah, it’s kind of a question of ‘who do you want to be?’. Personally, I put a fair bit of effort into suppressing ‘negative’ emotions (fear, uncertainty, sadness, envy) and try to encourage positivity (curiosity, joy, whatever the word for the opposite of envy is (ChatGPT says ‘mudita’, vicarious joy). I figure this tends to blunt some of the more subtle and nuanced emotional states since I’m kind of artificially managing the states, but it is a practice that helps people who depend on me feel stable and safe so they can do the things they want to do, which is important to me.

Compassion is probably the hardest to manage this way, mostly because it is a response to sympathetic feelings of negative emotions. Like, if I see someone who is sad and I am suppressing my sadness emotions this also has a heavy damping effect on my sympathetic sadness which is what usually triggers compassionate behavior. So I have to kind of manually watch for situations where sympathetic responses are appropriate and ease up on the suppression a bit (but not too much) to allow the empathy to kick in.

If you want to grow the sport, you need to facilitate a safe and welcoming environment for everyone.

Hm. In addition to a welcoming environment it might be fun to have a ‘cutthroat’ class with an opposite approach where intimidation, bullying, and over-the-top shit-talking is encouraged. They could have competitors come out in like pro-wrestling gear or something and have a stare-down at the beginning of the match.

need to be taught how to feel.

And before that you’d need to convince a lot of us that that would be more useful than the current situation.