Right... I worked for The Beer Store, the brewer-owned private company which distributes beer across the Province of Ontario. Our Premier (roughly equivalent to a State Governor) made a campaign promise of "A buck a beer!".

So, a new empty can cost roughly $0.20 at the time. The law in Ontario is that shelf prices include tax and deposit. So, the can is $0.30 - twenty cents for the can itself, plus another dime for the deposit to make sure the used can comes back for recycling.

Now, on top of that, you have to make a food-grade beverage, pay your excise tax to the federal government, and then there have to be profits for the manufacturer and the distributor/retailer (that would be Brewers Distributing Limited dba. The Beer Store).

Customers would come to me and - with that "I know more than you even though I haven't held a job in 16 years" expertise - tell me that we were going to be carrying "buck a beer" because they voted for Doug Ford (who also cut their welfare increases).

"When do you get it? It's gotta be soon!"

"The first shipment arrives February 31st, so mark your calendar!"

I must have used that line 500 times. Only one person realized that there's no February 31st. To his credit, he had to come back to the store to tell me. LOL

Exactly ONE brewer made the Buck A Beer - Cool Brewing of Etobicoke, in Doug Ford's riding. We were lucky if we got a single case (24 beers) a month. Promise fulfilled... Right.

Anyway... The Beer Store's shelf tags were printed at the distribution center and sent to stores with truckloads of beer and empties in and out. Of course, you always had too many tags you didn't need, and were always short of the shelf tags that you did need. If a tag was outdated and wrong, you have to - ethically if not legally - honour the price. And, of course, if a tag was damaged or lost, there was no tag for that product. All of this hearkened back to The Beer Store's roots as Brewer's Retail where everything was behind a counter and we had a selection wall. In a newer self-service store like mine, this did not work.

Electronic shelf tags were implemented. It was amazing. Snap the tag into place on the shelf. Scan the tag. Scan the product. Press a button. The scan gun would beep and a moment later, the tag would update with the item description and price.

Price changes? Automatically updated on all tags.

Now, something about selling addictive substances: Sometimes someone decides that the item's price is what they have, not what the shelf tag says. And they will argue with you until the cows come home. You get jaded to it.

"That will be $2.25 for the can of Pabst Blue Ribbon 5.9."

"The tag says $1.95 so you have to give it to me for that. You forgot to update the sticker."

"No sir, I assure you that it doesn't. They're not stickers, they're electronic and tied to the POS."

"It says $1.95."

"Sir, if the shelf tag says $1.95 for Pabst Blue Ribbon 5.9, I will give you a full case of it. On the house."

For a moment, they're elated. And then they realize that I'm coming out from behind the counter to call their bluff. In front of the lineup of impatient customers during the daily 10:01AM opening rush. Catcalls. Whistles. Jeers.

Walk over with the dude... shelf tag says $2.25 for PBR 5.9. Now, at this point, I'm annoyed, and I'm not going to short my till $0.30 for him. Or suggest to him an alternative beer that is $1.95 a can. If he'd just passed me all his change and come up a little short, I would have covered it. Personally, out of my pocket, if I didn't have a few nickels and dimes perpetually floating around my cash. I've spent way too much time on both sides of the counter at The Beer Store, so I have plenty of empathy - just don't be an asshole.

Anyway... Dollar stores are dealing with customers who are on the very bottom economic rung, whether from addiction or for some other bad life event. Now, sometimes these people are a nickel away from being able to afford a can of beer - or a jar of baby food. I have seen split tender three ways for a $2 item - $0.50 from returning 5 empty cans, $0.97 by scraping a prepaid Mastercard from last Christmas to the last cent, and then $0.55 from under the sofa cushions or wherever. Unexpected price changes can drastically upset plans these people have made to get a few supplies with their very last dollar.

"I can get a box of Kraft Dinner at Dollarama for $0.50, and two cans of cat food at A Buck Or Two with the other $0.50..." I've seen it, and I've personally lived it.

The shelf tags, especially at a dollar/discount/alcohol/cannabis store of any sort, must be accurate. As an experienced retail manager, electronic shelf tags are simply essential.

You can sell the boss on implementing them with the operational savings, the labour of having to change stickers with every price change. Electronic shelf tags will pay for themselves in very short order.

You're clearly not talking about American cars. What's a 1-tonne Ford Escort? I did have a 1983 Dodge Ram D150 half-ton pickup truck with a Slant-6 and an A-833 manual transmission; that thing would get 25MPG and hold 75MPH all the way westbound across Michigan... of course, it took it a while to get to 75MPH, merging was just like driving a Peterbilt with a 53' trailer full of anvils. That exact same engine and a comparable transmission were available for the Dodge Trucks line from 1960 to 1987 and was renowned for durability and reliability.

The key point is that Americans typically don't want them. To this day, in Canada, gasoline is cheaper than water. I'm not sure if that's a statement about gas prices or a slam against the sort of fool who feels the need to buy their tapwater in PET bottles, but I digress. So people buy horsepower. People buy large vehicles based on truck platforms.

As CAFE forces vehicles to become more fuel efficient - without addressing the underlying consumer demand problem! - manufacturers are being forced to use smaller and smaller engines. This means adding turbochargers to cute little aluminum blocks, narrower cam lobes and variable displacement oil pumps and smaller oil control rings all to reduce the internal drag, and thinner oils which offer zero cushion on connecting rod bearings. All of this gets stuffed into a full-size pickup truck with a trailer hitch. They're intolerant of real-world conditions and use, and because of their complexity they're expensive to repair. These vehicles will not have a long lifespan - sure, you might get a good fleet average mileage, but if 50% of the vehicles don't make it to the 100,000 mile mark, they're getting replaced faster with all the environmental damage of producing and disposing of the vehicle.

Maximizing vehicle life is an important part of reducing the vehicle's overall environmental impact.

There's a great YouTube channel where the owner of a full-service used auto parts business takes apart modern engines and shows you what failed. No prior knowledge of engines is required to understand this. Some engines are spectacularly broken. And Eric talks about what will last, and what won't, with an entertaining sarcasm.

Recycling? The lead-acid primary battery gets removed, then the car gets crushed and shredded. Only the steel and the aluminum get recycled. Anyone who thinks that any other material in a car gets recycled in any quantity has never seen a car shredder in operation. ASR (Auto Shredder Residue) is a special waste stream now consisting mostly of mixed plastics, smashed safety glass, and the crap people leave in their cars when they junk them. All that plastic gets landfilled.

I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.

There's nothing like a good smack to the beitzim to stop a would-be rapist. And there's nothing like biting someone if it's all the leverage you have.

Remember, this is not a video game or a sanctioned fight in a boxing ring. This is your life versus the life of a terrorist or other attacker. Kill or be killed. Learn to fight.

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

Greetings from Y2K!

So yeah, here's part of the issue. Car shredders. Crushed cars don't just get dumped into big pits of molten steel, crushed cars get shredded with large high speed hammermills and the component materials - iron/steel, aluminum - get separated out by magnetic and eddy current separators. The rest is called Auto Shredder Residue and ends up landfilled. It's all the copper and the materials that used to be glass and plastic dashboards and o-rings in Macpherson struts and stuff like that.

If you haven't seen ASR, it's a relatively fine grain, probably mostly under 0.5", and with modern cars, it's mostly plastic.

If you drop a Tesla into a car shredder (the eventual fate of most cars), I think the batteries will end up as ASR. And then you're trying to separate cobalt battery components from the old stuffed toys left in the back seat.

How do we shred this better, and why are we not already doing this with municipal waste? Hammermills have windage losses and crazy internal wear. Low veolcity high torque machines need even worse maintenance. Robots to disassemble cars seems like a good idea, until you've actually worked in an automotive wrecking yard and seen that cars often no longer look like cars....

There we go. Heavy water, the ultimate in pricey bottled water.

Move over, Perrier. This one's got kick!

It's neat that we can taste the difference, and if bottled water suppliers can mass produce it as a beverage it will surely reduce the operating costs of some types of nuclear reactors.

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company.

Our toilets are much the same here in Canada - residential use toilets are gravity-fed with typically 6L per flush from a "close-coupled" tank which is mounted directly on top of the bowl. The tank is filled from municipal or well supply, which is typically at 50PSI or so, but the fill valve is the only part of the system under pressure.

They operate by momentum, not by pressure. m1*v1 = m2*v2. The pressure would be limited by the head, which is typically only 2 feet or so. The secret to their effectiveness is allowing 6 kilograms of water to accelerate as quickly as possible in the height allowed by the design and have it collide with the ...dark matter... to drive it away.

Most residential plumbing systems use 1/2" ID supply pipe which would simply not allow a pressurized flush like a commercial toilet to be effective. There are exceptions which use bladder systems to attempt to leverage the standing water pressure of the municipal water supply to drive the flush water down to the bowl as quickly as possible. These systems tend to be expensive, unreliable, and loud, although one day these issues may be resolved.

Improvements to the existing system will require very carefully designed bowls and trapways and exceptionally well-installed plumbing with regard to soil pipe slope and venting. My own home is outfitted with 3L per flush toilets which do an admirable job - I have yet to clog them, even after a visit to a buffet restaurant - despite being purely momentum-based close-coupled toilets without the additional complexity and failure-prone seals in dual-flush mechanisms.

Adding technology is not the answer to this problem. Keeping it as simple as possible but doing the basics really well is key.

ALL tape formats, whether open-reel or inside a cassette or cartridge, are vulnerable to this form of failure. So your dad's 8-tracks and cassettes are hardly immune. In fact, 8-tracks, even when they're not left in the sun on car dashboards, die because they're an endless loop and the glue that holds the metal foil splice that signals the track change has a tendency to fail... and the lubricant on the tape might even exacerbate the failure of the binding. 8-tracks were marginal at best when they were new; most machines of the day basically knocked their heads out of alignment four times with each album. But they were designed for car audio at a time when a good car sound system was a 5x7" speaker in the dashboard and road noise drowned out the tape hiss.

The Philips Compact Cassette (a cassette, to most people) was designed for dictation machines where sound quality was not a design criteria. It's a miracle of our technology that they ever sounded good enough for things like the Sony Walkman to happen.

The machines were, and still are, beautiful. Good ones were usually pretty expensive and represented the state of the art in their day, like a flagship smartphone or laptop computer now. Even obsolete, you can see the quality and the beauty.

But the real problem is the recordings. It's not just stuff like home recordings off the radio, it's original masters of albums. The Beatles early BBC stuff was recorded on Ferrograph machines (I love that name, think about what it means). God only knows what the tape formulation was; iron oxide, for sure, but what were the binders?

Most Slashdotters will be familiar with cassettes moving the tape at 1-7/8 inches per second. 7-1/2 inches per second was common in home audio. 15 inches per second in professional/studio audio use was fairly slow! At those speeds, as the tape plays, the oxide breaks free from the binder and blocks the head gap pretty quickly. Slowing down the tape and digitally replaying it faster might help, but it doesn't change the fact that A Day In The Life is a lot of tape at 15IPS - and a it's distance, not speed, that really clogs the head gaps. 5 minutes and 35 seconds is 418 feet of tape at 15IPS. No matter how quickly or slowly you play it, you could tie one end to the balcony railing of a 42nd floor apartment and the reel would still be unwinding when it hits the sidewalk below. And that's A Day In The Life, not something crazy long!

Now you add video recording with high-velocity spinning video heads to tape with flaky backing, and you're going to have a real problem playing this media down the road. You need the machine, stable tape, and someone who actually knows how to do it.

With commercial video formats far before VHS, there aren't many people alive who know how to maintain and run an Ampex Quad machine, for example. And with that, it's the end of countless hours of video recordings since the dawn of VTRs in the 1950s - Dr. Who, Coronation Street, WKRP. Life-altering news events, triumphs and tragedies. This is akin to losing our literary history because no one knows how to read.

Yeah. This could easily result in more deaths than World War II. Don't be flippant about this. This is the biggest crisis since then.

I am in a high-risk population for bad complications to this disease, and probably a great many Slashdotters are. Come on, we don't generally lead the healthiest lifestyles.

Give me one of those stickers now. I'll take my chances. Someone's got to be the test pilot for every new fighter jet design, right?

Okay; not guaranteed to work yet, I get it. But already scalable to mass production, unrefrigerated transportation in the form of a flat sticker in the mail, and basically a "Place on clean hairless skin anywhere on your body. Leave sticker on until it falls off." is a hell of a lot faster/cheaper/safer and with more population compliance than an injection campaign. Even if it only protects 25% of patients, it's already a game-changer in herd immunity or herd isolation. So what are the chances that this is safe on humans?

If it's safe on humans, then yeah, I'll be a guinea pig for a study. Just don't give me the placebo. :)