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Smart light switch default behaviour
  • The Enbrighten Zigbee switches I installed in some rooms work exactly as you note, if the zigbee network collapses for some reason, they still control the outlet or light they are hard wired to like any other dumb switch. I think for hardwired switches this is the normal behavior. For anything like Hue or Ikea Tradfri switches that are battery powered I think it highly depends on what they are connected to.

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    How to scare the adults too
  • I don’t think so, tips are for service and moving my bag of food from the shelf behind you to the counter in front of you isn’t service, that’s just your job. I tip waiters, bar tenders, and drivers (delivery, ride share, cab). That said I’d love to get to a point where we can largely get rid of tipping by forcing full wages for all jobs and not tipped wages.

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    Bezos faces criticism after executives met with Trump on day of Post’s non-endorsement
  • So we did exactly this when we dropped our Prime membership a few years ago as part of working against Amazon building a massive warehouse in our fully residential borough (we won if anyone was wondering, they chose not to continue fighting it in court). We shop mostly in store at Target and other brick and mortar stores. We will also shop online still, but almost always directly from the manufacturer. This usually means paying shipping, but I figure our UPS driver and mail person need a paycheck too so we are fine with that. We will occasionally use Amazon for things that are just hard to find elsewhere but only order once our cart is in the free shipping price range. It turns out, Amazon is not only a shit company the uses dark patterns to push a mostly superfluous subscription, most things we buy are cheaper elsewhere. Combined with not buying nearly as much random crap, we have saved a butt load since quitting Amazon.

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    Why do cell phones have a data limit but home internet doesn't?
  • In theory at least it’s because you pay for a specific bandwidth for home internet (the size of the pipe) but a specific amount of data for cellular (how much stuff you can get through a fixed sized pipe).

    Home internet is a little unique in that way, almost all other utilities are consumption based with no real tiers in terms of how it’s delivered (you pay for the volume of water or gas you use, electricity is the same, just different units).

    Networking equipment gets more expensive based on the bandwidth it supports, but it doesn’t much care how many bits you push through it. So ISPs charge based on their capacity to deliver those bits, and provide tiers at different price points. Cellular though is much more bandwidth constrained due to the technologies (and it used to be much more so before LTE and 5G), so it didn’t makes sense to charge you for slow or slower tiers. Instead the limiting factor is the capacity of a tower so by limiting data to small amounts it naturally discourages use. That model carried forward even now that the technologies support broadband speeds in some cases. As such and ISP could provide the biggest pipe (highest speed) to all homes and just charge based on consumption (they used to in the days of dial up, and satellite before starlink always has). Many ISPs instead are now double dipping though and charging for both.

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    Boomer used counter scam, it was very effective!
  • The majority have moved away from cold calls and on to email and texting where they aim to trick folks into calling them. This is a better return on their investment since it’s cheaper and there’s way more chance to actually get a victim than cold calling.

    That said, most of the folks on the phone are either barely scraping by or are literal prisoners of violent gangs. They aren’t the ones to target (though they are the easiest to dislike since that’s who you end up dealing with). Take a browse of channels like scammer payback and kitboga who work to get to those actually in charge and to get the scam rings taken down.

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  • Not sure how helpful this may be, but for anyone that is looking for a testing resource in the Pittsburgh PA area, I did my evaluation yesterday with The Psychology Loft in Fox Chapel with Dr Williams (https://thepsychologyloft.com). Finding anywhere that takes adults for evaluations is tough, and Pittsburgh has few options I found generally. But I was able to get an appointment very quickly (about a month and a half out from when I contacted them) and everything’s been easy to navigate. Dr. Williams has been great so far and I am nervously awaiting my feedback session next week where I’ll get results and discuss next steps.

    Don’t let the difficulties in finding appointments for adults keep you from getting evaluated. Clinics do exist and there are doctors that want to help.

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    Largest retail breach in history: 350 Million "Hot Topic" customers’ personal & payment data exposed — as a result of infostealer infection.
  • Looks from the article like it was stolen by infecting the PC of a third party analytics firm user who had privileged access to Hot Topics snowflake data warehouses and didn’t have MFA enabled. That is just inexcusable in this day and age and $100k is a small price for Hot Topics snowflake to pay for that fuck up (assuming the bad actor actually follows through and doesn’t sell the data if HT pays the price set). Pro tip (or really amateur tip), MFA all the things. Even SMS based MFA is better than no MFA even though it’s not ideal.

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    for all those tall girlies
  • My wife and I both switched to barefoot shoes (we were mostly shoes from Xero but I also like Vivobarefoot) and I can say that being able to feel the ground you walk on is kind of the point. Obviously you don’t want to feel the sharp edges of rocks or hurt your feet on broken glass or something, but the outsoles are tough enough to smooth out the really sharp edges while still allowing your foot to move and feel the features you are walking in. It takes getting used to (it’s recommended to take at least a month or so of slowly increasing the proportion of time you wear them) but I have never had shoes that are as comfortable as my barefoot shoes. Did multiple days of 10+ km on tours around Italy in the summer and my feet never hurt (only were tired, like the rest of me).

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    When you hear "Solid wood", how do you interpret that?
  • Solid wood is generally understood to be lumber or timber, that is pieces of wood sawn from a tree. This is distinct from engineered wood or manufactured wood products which include MDF, plywood, and OSB. Engineered wood is made of fibers or strands that are pressed or glued, there is more in the final stock than just wood (I.e., glue, lignin separated via heating and pressing).

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    In app Mod log
  • You already can from within each community, it’s under the three dot menu at the top.

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    Does your cat let you sleep/nap not facing them?
  • Our cat will put us to bed. When we turn the light off she will lay on my hip for 5-15 minutes then once she’s convinced I’m asleep (I’m not) she will hop off the bed and go do cat things (she tells us it’s catslified and we can’t know she does these cat things). She sometimes will lay on my wife for 30 seconds, maybe a minute but always lays on me. She’ll pace around too until I lay on my side so she can put me to bed.

    In the winter she’ll come back and snuggle up with one of us because she likes the warmth and we keep it cooler at night. In the summer she’ll lays a bit further away near one of us (usually pinning the blanket down so I can’t get up). She is truly a creature of habit.

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    ELI5 How do rich people just hide their money in offshore bank accounts? Do they just call up the bank and say I want transfer such and money? How come the original bank doesn't catch on?
  • In addition, all the secured loans they take make them look on paper as though they are deeply in debt and that debt then is a tax write off. This further lowers their tax brackets so they pay even less. Add to this that in the US at least only income is taxed, all of the stocks, options, and other assets they hold are non-taxable since they aren’t cash; technically their value can (and does) change regularly and they can become worthless just as easily as they can gain value and so it was determined they aren’t income since nothing is realized until they are sold.

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    It sure looks like Trump watches are breaking copyright law
  • The creativity is in how the photo was shot; the camera settings, framing, when the photographer chose to take the photo, etc. To say that anyone could have taken this exact photo is both incorrect and doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written any book, play, or script but they didn’t. Anyone could have painted pretty much any particular painting, but they didn’t. I don’t disagree that many aspects of US copyright law are ridiculous, but to say there’s no artistic vision in taking a photograph like this is ignorant.

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    A Rubberized Cybertruck Is Plowing Through European Pedestrian Safety Rules
  • No, because no one intends to hit a pedestrian with the car they are buying. That’s why we need to mandate safer vehicles, not trust people to factor that in as they look for a car.

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    What careers are relatively easy to get into with decent unions behind them?
  • In case you’re looking for something more white collar, I have found working for government prime contractors to be a sweet spot. I know, it feels gross to work for “the man” or to be the ones taking in those tax dollars, but hear me out.

    The work is well defined, they are very often unionized, even the office staff, and it’s essentially guaranteed employment as long as you want to work there. I’ve also found that putting in what I consider pretty normal levels of effort is highly rewarded because often the bar is pretty low by those that have been in the various companies for decades that no longer care. As long as you guard against professional apathy and keep driving yourself to do the best you can, it’s can be a great sector to work in.

    I would suggest looking for ones you don’t already know the names of though (often small subsidiaries of the larger companies are fine). Battelle for instance operates almost all of the DoE national labs and I hear from colleagues they are a good company with labs all over the country that need scientists, engineers, accountants, IT pros, facility folks, etc.

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    Boris Johnson calls for referendum on leaving ECHR
  • That story (and narrative) is somewhat disingenuous though. The official vote, and thus the will of the British people, was to leave. To say that’s wrong because people didn’t understand what their vote meant or weren’t shown how they should register really speaks more to how poorly the remain campaigns communicated the seriousness of the referendum and what it would mean to cast a leave vote or to not vote at all.

    Look, I think it was a poor choice for the UK to leave the EU. And as an American I get how frustrating it is when electoral systems mask what polling shows for a verity of reasons. But official elections are the source of truth in the democratic processes we have and to claim the results are false is dangerous whether it’s for brexit in the UK or for a president in the US.

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    America's youngest voters turn right
  • Here’s a gifted version, I think it still asks you to login but it’s not paywalled

    https://wapo.st/3zKhYRV

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    Running an electric car is twice as expensive as a petrol one
  • In addition some locations, like where I live, utilities only provide TOU rates for EV owners. These decrease electricity rates overnight so you can charge for cheaper when the grid has excess capacity. These decrease electricity upside is you can run tons of things overnight to take advantage of this (dishwashers, laundry, even your AC to overcool your home). Combine that with solar net metering that pays the standard rate due to the power being generated during peak loads and it can be huge savings, all just for owning an EV.

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    "Theyre FINE! Still got a thousand miles in them!" - He lied
  • When I ran long distance in high school I’d replace my shoes every year, over xc and track they probably had around 800km on them, some years a bit more others less. I learned quickly that changing brands or even models from what worked for me was bad so always got the Mizuno waveriders that were available that year.

    As others noted you’ll feel the midsole start that lose its cushion well before you see wear in it. Even when it looks like it has bounce, it may not be providing what you need to cushion the forces from running (a normal pace can see many times your body mass as force on your foot as you and you want to absorb a lot of that to not ruin your knees and hips).

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    Plex; Introducing Plex Photos Beta
  • They can, I turned off my plex VM to save resources but no real reason they can’t both point to the same libraries at once.

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    Plex; Introducing Plex Photos Beta
  • So still not addressing the myriad problems the player has, especially on AppleTV where it’s been reported for nearly half a decade to not work well. But hey you get yet another place to do photos things (which they admit literally no one wants or uses, they’d be better off dropping support for photos altogether).

    This is super frustrating because plex is very polished despite its clear bugs and misdirection. I just switched over to JellyFin and it’s faster and much more focused but just still has a lot of rough edges. I’m not sure which will be my long term solution but plex needs to attract folks to subscribe and focusing on features that 1/5 of a percent of users utilize is not how you do that.

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  • They started installing poles along a main road near where we live and I’m not sure what the white antennas on them are for. Some of the poles have traffic cameras like the one in the picture but others don’t. They are spaced every half to one mile and have antennas on opposite sides, with what looks like a radio cabinet near the base. The antennas are all aligned along the road, pointing parallel to traffic. This is in southwest Pennsylvania.

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    I’m still seeing new comments get two upvotes until I leave and come back to the post (so for sure something from Memmys end and not from the instance). I think this was reported before and was supposed to be fixed in a past version but I’m noticing it on the last few builds at least.

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