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 If a tag was outdated and wrong, you have to - ethically if not legally - honour the price.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.

So, we could use the renewable/carbon neutral (or negative) path .... OR .... not, but with lots of extra steps and no guarantee of success?

  "And then there's the problem of trying to stop. Because an abrupt end to geoengineering, with all the carbon still in the atmosphere, would cause the temperature to soar suddenly upward with unknown, but likely disastrous, effects... "

Just have an end to fossil-fuel use, you fucking idiots! That's a tractable challenge. That's something we have decades of experience with. Play to your strengths, humanity. Don't listen to fucking morons!!!

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.

This seems to have been an investment scheme. Who hired an architect who is this insane?

"One recalled warning Tarek Qaddumi, The Line's executive director, of the difficulty of suspending a 30-story building upside down from a bridge hundreds of metres in the air. 'You do realize the earth is spinning? And that tall towers sway?' he said. The chandelier, the architect explained, could 'start to move like a pendulum,' then 'pick up speed,' and eventually 'break off,' crashing into the marina below."

That level of nonsense is usually restricted to a flat-Earth message board. But these folks were hired? They had no intention of delivering this project. If they wanted to deliver it, they wouldn't have hired people from the local psyche-ward.

Anyone who voted this up is disgusting.

OP is also disgusting.

Since when do people who read "news for nerds, stuff that matters" advocate for racism? Good, old-fashioned racism? The kind that started in the 16th century, and should have died there?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

That this is a post and was moderated up is disgusting. What the hell is wrong with you?

"1) Canada has already lost its status. Its hard to see how that is Trump's fault."

It is the fault of people who cause other people to hesitate or not vaccinate. We call them anti-vaxxers.

"2) Trump has only been in office for less than a year. Its unlikely the measles outbreak is a result of any of his policies."

Trump appointed an anti-vaxxer to head the CDC. This is his policy. His actions drive this as much as RFK and other anti-vaxxers. No one seems to disagree that the folks who vote for silly policies view his silly policies as legit, and legit policies as silly. That means they are the same problem -- ignorance masquerading as a relevant choice due to people's fear, uncertainty, and doubt. The same things any flim-flam con-artist would brag about.

"3) The outbreak is all along the southwest border with large populations of people who lack access to regular health care."

Yes, it is truly sad to see how terrible healthcare is in the United States. Why do you view that as a reason to not try anything new, and give up what little is being done? We seem to agree that what exists is not satisfactory.

"Blaming anti-vaxxers is attributing way too much power to a fringe group."

Wrong. That's like saying the person who drove the car off the cliff isn't responsible, because the other people in the car could/should have wrestled the wheel away from the driver. The driver is responsible. It is ridiculous to claim otherwise (you sound brainwashed).

"Perhaps we should look at years of neglect of public health in those states instead. With millions of people lacking access to basic health care what did you expect?"

Yeah, normal people have decried the terrible state of public US health policy. The only improvement in the last 2 decades was Obama Care. What's with the Republicans taking that away? How far into the dark ages do they want us to go?

""Trump did it" has become the standard excuse for the widespread failure of our political class. You can just point the finger at Trump and pretend the problems will be solved when he goes away. So his rival politicians will spend the next three years talking about Trump instead of addressing how to make our lives better."

Like you are doing? This "point" seems weirdly self-antithetical. Trump is one part; there's also Justice/SCOTUS, Senate, Congress. All aspects of government are in government, otherwise it's not government. Seems tautological.

"Its not that there isn't a lot to criticize about Trump. Its that most of the criticism is directed at minor sideshows like this one. And I say that as a former community health worker who spent a couple years knocking on parent's doors to increase the level of MMR vaccinations in local schools. I may have run into one parent who opposed vaccination. The rest just lacked the personal resources to get their kids immunized. They had a hard time making sure their kids had breakfast and got to school."

You know, programs that provide food to those in need + vaccine resources were cut by Trump and his cabinet of doom? This "point" also illustrates that this problem is big and has many factors at play, like problems that humans have traditionally banded together to face. That's why most developed countries (just the USA abstaining) use socialized healthcare policies.

Frankly, your confused post just shows why the problem seems intractable to the occupants of the country most victimized by their own medical policies -- the current USA medical policy is rake-stepping! You have people who make more money than god from medical care profits which are in the bleeding-from-your-eyes-numbers of over ,000 markup, because no-one shops around for things like bullet extractions. It's not a service that does well in unregulated capitalism (unless you own the company selling heroin, in which case you're billionaires and don't care).

Trump is also a promoter of that. It's valid to mention the toxic effect his cabinet and policies have had during *BOTH* of his terms, because that is literally what's happening now. These are the issues we agree on, and these are things driving those issues. The learned helplessness and unwillingness to challenge ignorance you seem to suggest isn't helpful, in my opinion.

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. :)

Hahaha, what?

You say the pilot in control should have intentionally sheered off the wings (FULL OF JET FUEL) off during a dual-engine failure? You obviously have no idea about planes.

There is nothing that could have been done. They were past V1. There was no arrester pit at the end of the runway (which wouldn't have done much). We're talking about a vehicle loaded with 10,000s of lbs of fuel. Sheering the wings off would have spread chaos and destruction.

There is nothing that could have been done.

Ok, except: that doesn't address vulnerabilities in C/C++ apps which are stopped in Rust. This also ignores the fact that there already exist functional tests of these core utilities.

If I can swap a 2mm hex nut from company A for a 2mm hex nut from company B -- and the nuts pass acceptance tests -- that's what you want. It's *ELIMINATING* sources of error within the existing framework of tests.

Sounds like a huge waste of resources. P = MV. Any form of air-balloon is ... how many kilograms? The plane will be going at less than mach 1.

Also, do you not understand what ADSB is? I think you mean TCAS.

This does not have free will. It reflects the biases of information. That it displays oppositional defiance disorder means the creators of the model failed to curate the input data correctly. Garbage in, garbage out.

Does NO ONE understand how LLMs are implemented? It's only a statistical model! Learn statistical experiment design and analysis. Always have HITL safety rails. Always have cross-check software safety rails. These concepts are new to people who don't study information science. These concepts are decades old to people who study information science.

The term you're looking for is "human in the loop" aka HITL.