Should be "garden leave" with full pay and benefits (especially health insurance) while the noncompete runs. If they want you to not work, they can damn well pay you for the privilege.

I'm thinking that the yoga studio could be similar to a hair salon in that customers form a bond with a particular provider and then follow that provider if they move to another business. I can see that happening in the case where there's a high degree of individualized instruction, and the person is more like a personal trainer than an instructor teaching yoga classes to a group.

It's the cost of providing medical care to people who are hurt in a car accident. The US stands alone among rich countries in medical costs. Also care that's provided as the result of an MVA typically gets charged at the much higher "rack rate", not at the discounted rate your health insurer may have negotiated with your provider.

who overwhelmingly lean Democratic as an organizational and informational tool for political purposes, to spread ideas and actions that are inimical to Republicans and their policies. One example was when Tik Tok users punked a Trump rally in Tulsa in June 2020.

Granted, it's also spyware, and concerns that it could be used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese government are also fair. But that's just a smokescreen for the real reason, which is that Republicans want to shut down a communications tool that's overwhelmingly used by their opposition.

I thought tipping was one of those customs that was peculiar to the USA, and that tipping in Australia wasn't a thing? And then on top of it to ask for a USA-sized tip for a reduced level of personal service under which you have to send your own order in to the kitchen.

I am also sad to hear that these BS fees are taking hold in .au as a way of keeping menu prices ostensibly the same and then sticking it to the customer at the end.

If you live with an abusive partner or parent(s) and have a secret "emergency phone" tucked away somewhere that your abuser doesn't know about, turn it off before this test. Only turn it back on when "safe" (i.e. your abuser is out of the house or you've taken the phone somewhere safe) in case the alert comes through when the phone turns back on.

Any suggestion by anybody that I relocate to coastal California, let alone the SF Bay area, would be met with "You want me to live WHERE?" followed by ten minutes of laughing. Literally, you could not possibly pay me enough to live there. Not because I consider living there undesirable, it's because I cannot imagine what honest job I could get that would allow me to afford housing.

Sometimes they also do more harm than good by placing artificial restrictions on supply. In many US cities the real value of owning a taxi medallion isn't in the revenue from providing passenger service for a fee, it's capital gains from the appreciation of the medallion. Any proposal to expand the number of available taxis is thus fought tooth-and-nail by incumbent medallion owners who do not want to see their asset diluted by the creation of additional medallions. The result is that it's damned hard to get a regular cab, or to get a cab to take you to a suburban neighborhood where there's little possibility of picking up a return fare.

The fact that the existing regulatory regime in those places serves not the public interest but the interests of the medallion owners is what enabled companies like Uber and Lyft to gain a foothold. At the end of the day people just want to be able to pay money and have a car show up.

Waze's carpooling always seemed to me to be an analog to Samsung's Bixby. Their attempt to get in on ridesharing a la Uber/Lyft with a decidedly inferior product. And, like Samsung did with Bixby, they kept pushing it despite nobody using it or wanting it. I'm just glad I'm not going to be activating that annoying screen when I use Waze any more.

Or that people who oversalt their food tend to be smokers. Just from casual anecdata I've seen a lot of smokers who dump salt on their food, probably because smoking has dulled their sense of taste.

He was the production designer and a lot of how the movie looked was his in terms of props, set dressing, etc.

Typically the second button down on the right hand side is a "mute" button so you can at least shut those things up.

at least in most Western countries. With antivaxers entrenched in their beliefs, vaccine uptake rate is not going to improve substantially anywhere. Meanwhile the virus is going to continue to mutate and evolve, and we're going to be fighting off Greek-letter variants forever, while going through a cycle of relaxing restrictions, then going through another wave with this year's new variant, then imposing restrictions until case rates go down, lather, rinse, repeat.

1. Boot from a Linux live USB stick, use hdparm to secure-erase the drive, or "nvme sanitize", whatever method your drive might support.
2. Use a specialty tool from the drive manufacturer that claims to provide secure data deletion.
3. There are commercial solutions that claim to do whole-drive erasure, presumably with a friendlier front-end for the less technically inclined, but I don't know much of anything about them.

"Some of it gets turned into high fructose corn syrup, to reduce American's dependence on cane sugar imports."

America is the only country that makes extensive use of HFCS in place of sugar in soft drinks and processed foods, and it's because there's an exorbitant tariff on sugar imports to the US. This tariff exists as a slap-in-the-face to Fidel Castro, because sugar was Cuba's biggest export cash crop at the time Castro came to power, and anti-Castro politicians wanted to hurt Cuba's ability to generate hard currency. Like the trade and travel embargo on Cuba generally, it continues because there's a large contingent of anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Florida, and Florida is a swing state in Presidential elections.