The CC processors have NO incentive to even care if the borrower defaults - they get their cut at the time of the transaction, skimmed right off the top. The only transactions they don't like are fraudulent ones, and that's only because when those get reversed, they don't get their cut.

As far as these jackals are concerned, the more transactions, the better - they want you paying for *everything* with your card. (And encouraging card use through "rewarding" you with a small portion of their take, which they make a fortune on anyway, just from the float!)

Merchants should start adding 10% for using a card. (This used to be prohibited by the merchant card agreements, but they lost in court a few years ago so AFAIK this *can* be done. Anyplace it's prohibited, you could offer a 10% discount for cash.)

Once again, ignorance of physics and engineering permeate an article rah-rah-ing for a scheme that can simply never work all that well.

The ignorance is of the *quality* of heat - there's plenty of low-quality heat (and you'll lose a lot of that into sand before you can get to temps that provide high enough heat quality (delta-T) to be very useful for anything. And when you're done, you still don't have the advantages of latent heats of condensation vaporization. There's a reason phase changes rule in heat engines, from motors to air conditioners!)

Have a look at Windy. I can't speak to their APIs, but the web and app versions are both excellent in thier own interfaces as well as fed by excellent data - some of which would cost a fortune to get elsewhere. It really is one of the most impressive weather apps on the net.

NOAA is OK, but Windy is excellent - and will be the last SaaS subscription I have after purging all the others - it's the only SaaS sub I can recommend without reservation. Windy provides *many* more (and often better) models than NOAA does, with really good visuals, to boot.

Big Companies almost always wind up destroying the fundamental value underlying their acquisitions. Intellicast legitimately revolutionized high-graphics weather maps and other info and was arguably the first graphically intensive web weather site on the Internet. They were also an early pioneer with using JavaScript to provide a better, faster, and much more responsive UI than any of their competitors. Wunderground originated as a commercial spinoff of the University of Michigan Weather Underground FTP server, and later added the amazing Weather Station Network to collect fine-grained data from thousands of sites, changing the data feeding finer-grained WX models. Both sites were pretty much destroyed by IBM's acquisition - Intellicast (which had already fallen from previous glory) became a bad me-too site mostly parroting crap opinions from the Weather Channel, which IBM had also acquired, and Wunderground's amazing Wundermap driven by that sensor network was reimplemented in some trendy language/platform that produced such a huge performance/responsiveness hit that it was effectively unusable for a couple of years.

(Aside: over 30 years ago, I wrote a fairly simple set of (k)sh scripts for a Fortune 10 company to pull satellite images down from the Weather Underground FTP server and assemble them in the correct order in to provide a video weather animation in X, something that normally required a $50K/year professional WX service subscription. (Yeah, interestingly, I did all this through command line scripting an expect - I didn't have to write any "real" program code at all. Later versions even cleaned up the images using the then-new ImageMagick, also from the command line....)

Yeah, Prime's value proposition is gone. I doubt I run much more than two or three under $35 Amazon orders per year anyway, so it's not like I *need* Prime. I used to justify it for Prime video, but with the crashing content quality, and Amazon's continual killing off of shows we really like (Z, The Last Tycoon, Night Sky, etc., etc.) in favor of execrable dreck like Rings of Power or their latest perverted LGBTQIACRT sh*t...

With very few exceptions (literally only a few a year), the only thing we use Amazon Prime services for is to use Alexa as a voice controlled radio or music player.
Amazon's pissing me off badly enough in other areas that I'd just as soon drop them, if I can easily replace that functionality.

Does anyone know of an already-sorted, distributed, voice-controlled *local* media player solution? Sure, I have the skills and could put all the pieces together myself (I'd even buy new hardware to replace the Echoes, if needed, since we've only got a few - or reflash them with new firmware if that's necessary...), but I've got better things to do with my life than design and build an entire media system right now, so I'm looking for a solution that someone else has already gotten working.

I'm figuring some of the home automation folks have already got this done, but maybe not...

The vast majority of the code professional programmers write is code they simply should not be writing in the first place.

If we're ever going to progress beyond the 1960s programming mentality (which was brilliant for the limitations of computers then, but fails today), we need a more standardized, modular approach to programming. Platforms were an attempt to do this, but, really, much of this needs to be integrated into the language. (For all its many faults, the Ruby/Rails combo was an attempt to do the right thing here...)

This cannot really be fixed until the chasm between languages (and their data structures) and databases (as well as filesystems and object storage) is bridged well and correctly, since a huge portion of what we code is dealing (badly and inconsistently) with the crapfest that performs those mappings. Again, for all its many faults, M (aka MUMPS, a language that took a decidedly unusual approach in the 60s) was pointing the right way, here...)

From a visual programming perspective (which is really only possible once you have standardized the things mentioned above), I'd say that things like NodeRed (perhaps the best at the moment, if it were based on Lua and Tarantool, it would solve the problem I have this month...), NI's LabView, and to a lesser extent things like Matlab and Mathematica show some of the directions that we can go. We're embarrassingly bad at doing this two decades into the century. (And we cannot forget that there are a lot of propellerheads who *want* to keep this stuff hard because it makes them needed and more valuable. That's stupid and counterproductive, but the attitude is *really* hard to overcome, as it's mostly opposition through subtle sabotage by subterfuge by capable operators "protecting their turf"...)

I'd argue part of the strength of the Python community is that many of the key libraries (both core libs and defacto tools like SciPy and NumPy) have reached a point of capability and maturity that lets them be glued together fairly easily as modules - there's just not a good visual programming tool for doing that yet. (And, sadly, since Python is such a good glue language, there's less incentive to build one...)

I'm a bit surprised that we haven't seen a better GraphQL visual programming language/tool/environment yet...

This is as firmly from "It doesn't matter at all!" Department as it is possible to be. Omicron causes death or injury in only a vanishingly small number of cases. South Africa is already over it. It's symptoms are *literally* indistinguishable from common cold sniffles.

There is NO vaccine risk that is justifiable for a bug that causes so little impact.

And the "vaccine" risks are indeed quite substantial, and those are just the ones we know about - given what we see in VAERS, and in countries that actually collect usable data, liek the UK and Israel, there are many, many more effects that will show up over time. (See Steve Kirsch's excellent roundup site for more: https://stevekirsch.substack.c... Yes, he's anti-vax, but he came to it honestly and reluctantly, led by the massive amount of data showing these "vaccines" are in fact horribly dangerous. On the rare occasions I've managed to get pro-vaxx healthcare professionals to look at his site, they cannot provide *any* example of anything being reported that is factually wrong - they just don't like the inevitable conclusion the data demands...)

Agreed. And I'd be far more likely to consider Alpha/Wolfram if it (like nearly all other modern data platforms except SAS and Matlab), was open source and allowed me to deploy it in the field on whatever hardware and OS I choose, with no cloud dependencies.

There are some interesting ideas in the Wolfram language, but there's a non-trivial learning curve, and at the end of the day it's still a proprietary environment. Sometimes that makes sense, like Oracle can sometimes make sense, but in general, the healthiest parts of the open source world (as opposed to say, log4j...) such as Python, Julia, R, etc. are not only capable, but (like Linux was a few years ago before unsustainable bloat corrupted its soul), they are getting better faster than anything else. In the end, that matters.

('ll go out on a limb and predict that inside of single-digit years, we will see a significant shift from Linux to one or more of the BSDs, simply because Linux is getting too big, complicated and spread out to continue to work, much less work in an efficient and secure way, and BSD is the only reasonable alternative that existing code can be made to run on with minimal modification and no proprietary entanglements.)

*Every* time I have tried to get Wolfram Alpha to answer or analyze in a non-trivial way, I have failed. It may be possible to figure out how to structure a query in such a way that it can actually provide the answer I'm looking for, but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm pretty good at unambiguously defining a problem in English. That's a pretty bad failure rate for a service that's supposed to be able to answer natural language queries.

I really can't figure out who Alpha is for - the Mathematica people don't need it, and the rest of us don't know (and definitely don't care to learn) enough of the way Mathematica works to be able to make it useful. (To be fair, I haven't tried it in the last two years - I have better things to do with my life, since I can often just find or work out the answer myself more quickly than I could figure out the correct way to build a query that will let Alpha give me the answer I'm looking for, though as I said, my success rate for non-trivial things is zero, so I've just quit trying to use it...)

I use a gas one for the same reason, but my electric is corded, not battery. It's still wimpy by comparison.

Batteries take many hours to recharge, and in my experience, must be charged right before use - I've never seen *ANY* battery-powered "power tool" that can be recharged one weekend, and used effectively the next. Battery tech is just still not that good yet...

As for gas - I keep several cans at home, and only refill them once a year, so time to refuel is generally no more than 3 minutes including an iced tea break.

DILLIGAS - Do I Look Like I Give A Shit?

Battery-powered power tools suck huevos. I've just spent the last few weeks doing some construction projects both for myself and to help out a friend who's a contractor, and it has absolutely reaffirmed my opinion that there are few stupider ideas on the planet than power tools that rely on rechargeable power packs. (Actually, I' swearing off rechargeable batteries everywhere I can - they just flat don't work well, and definitely won't work well in the very near future.)

We wound up using old-school AC-powered tools (where we could, we didn't have AC versions of everything) rather than waiting hours-long recharge cycles to get another few minutes of use before the packs died again. The really sad thing is that the batteries in all these packs were replaced just over a year ago at a non-trivial cost!

I *hate* battery-powered "power" tools - they just flat don't work, and can't possibly be any good for the environment: My brother says I need to "upgrade" to the new generation of rechargeable Lithium packs - but that would require buying nearly a dozen tools and accessories to replace the ones I already have, at a cost of over a thousand dollars to my wallet and who knows what to the environment both for the stuff I'd have to throw away, as well as the new Chinese Shit to replace it...

One thing that *might* help some would be standardization of batteries and/or packs to actually create at least a little bit of competition to build equipment that works well and has reasonable durability... Just sayin'....

Fortunately, since the US doesn't use chip and PIN, I don't know and don't want to know the PIN on my cards (except one debit card with a small account balance). I have my bank set a random, maximum length PIN that I DO NOT know. It's never been a problem at all.

And no, I would NEVER use a phone to pay (or even to access ANY financial accounts) - I have WAY too much experience with enterprise security for that...