I’ve been looking at getting solar installed, and been talking to a few different companies for quotes. One place only supplies PowerWall batteries, and I said to the sales rep that I wasn’t really interested in buying anything from Tesla and his face made it pretty clear that that was the answer he’d been getting a lot recently

Place I worked previously did this with Think pads - didn’t matter if you primarily used an email client or an IDE, you got the same 32GB RAM/i7/512GB NVMe. They were big enough to be ordering new laptops 50 at a time, and the overhead of having to manage different pools for swaps when things needed fixing or for upgrades wasn’t worth it. It only needed to save something like a billable hour a year over the book life of the laptop for it to be worth it

Please tell me they struck a deal with Zack

I mean, if he also wants to take on the costs of doing all the remediation work and ongoing maintenance and surveillance for the rest of time that’s probably a good deal for the city

… My first thought was “is this loss?”. I’m probably too online.

I’ve seen people with “I brought this before I knew Elon was an asshole” bumper stickers, I’d imagine there are updated ones kicking around

Many years ago, the university I studied at did some construction work in the chemistry department, which included rerouting the supply lines from the big oxygen and LPG tanks so they could reach the new lab they were building.

Turns out the contractor was either an idiot or misread the plans, and ended up running the pipes straight through one of the fire-resistant walls designed to compartmentalize the building so fires can’t spread as easily - a hole in one is a Big Deal on its own, but then running pipes full of accelerant through it essentially voided the buildings safety certificate and insurance, and ment that if there was a fire, the main evacuation path would have been a deathtrap.

I don’t know what happened to the contractor, but labs were closed for a few weeks while they purged the lines of gas, removed the badly installed lines and repaired the wall

It won’t help, but not having it sure will hurt

I’m totally going to use that line next time I talk to our QA manager

No worries - I’m a native, but still had to think about it a bit. English is weird

Sort of, there is a parallel derivation where tool can be an innuendo for penis (“used his tool”), so describing someone as a tool is a slightly less vulgar way of calling someone a dick; unrefined, rude, obnoxious.

In colloquial English, you can say that someone is an idiot with the construction “you absolute [noun]” or “you complete [noun]” or similar.

It doesn’t actually matter what the noun is, but it works better the more obscure or specific the thing is. For example “you absolute saucepan”, “you complete hose pipe”, or my personal favourite “you absolute strawberry plant”.

At a guess, to call attention to something by trying to hide it

Nah, that’s still engagement. Ignore it, and let it rot away

Oh totally, if you are playing by the rules then this can’t happen.

What happens if the GOP appoints him as their candidate in 4 years time? Presumably someone asks the supreme court to weigh in, but given it’s current make up, what happens if they say “yeah sure, because democrats are The Enemy” or something?

It’s just people, breaking the rules is always an option. Rules and laws only work if they are enforceable - and at the end of the day, who would be enforcing that he can’t run? The military? State militias?

It’s the tech aura. The machines know not to misbehave in his presence because they know what happens to machines that misbehave. It’s especially effective on printers, because (as everyone knows) printers are sentient machines imbued with the spirit of a lesser demon, and therefore do experience proper fear.

The thing people don’t really get about “bullet proof armour” is that it’s job is to stop the bullet going into you and messing up your fragile internals - but Newton still wins. The force still has to go somewhere.

Imagine someone held a stake to your chest then someone else smacked it with a sledgehammer - this would be a Very Bad Time for you, what with all the bleeding and internal trauma. If instead someone held you down with a steel plate and that was sledgehammered with the same force - it would hurt like hell, but probably not do the same amount of internal damage because the force is distributed over a wider area. There is of course a limit - at some point the force is still going to be too high and cause fatal damage.

Helmets work the same way - the internals of your head are very fragile, so keeping the bullet out is pretty important, but the same problem exists. The force has to go somewhere, and while getting whacked in the face with a sledgehammer is better than having a stake driven into your forehead it not that much better

Kinda says a lot about the US military that a supposedly well trained soldier - green berets are supposed to be fairly elite right? - couldn’t figure out how to build a bomb beyond just stuffing a car with whatever random flammables they could find

It wouldn’t be out of character for Trump to fuck over a friend/ally of he thinks it would get him an advantage in something he wants

What’s stopping you from learning to mod BF1 today? Why do you need some magic AI to make this happen?