Damn, I have mod points and was going to mod you up but I misclicked and moded you down so I'm replying to undo my mod.

On one hand, having friends who'd worked in security, I know how difficult it can be to stare at a bank of monitors watching for specific behaviours for hours on end. If I were working subway security I'd really appreciate an automated system that tracks a person's location and tells me if they're on the tracks when the train isn't safely parked at the station.

On the other hand the image quality of your bog standard CCTV camera is pretty shit and I'm going to worry about a bunch of false positives, something looks like a guy wielding a manchette in the blocky pixelated mess so you send a squad to stop them where you find it's just an old guy with a walking stick doing tricks for his grandson, so now you're back to a person staring at the bank of monitors but with the newly added annoyance of endless pings from the system saying "Potential crime in progress!" only to now have you missing the "real" crime while you're dealing with that.

PHBs likely looked at it as a way to mitigate risk. If we track the digital signatures and someone sues saying "That's not my signature, you helped them steal my identity!" then we're liable, but if we use a third party to track digital signatures then they're liable and we can get a nice payout for them violating our service contract and putting our clients at risk.

I've seen this too, it's why I have to often remind myself that a point in time observation doesn't point to long term behaviour.

Take this response for example, I've been working almost non stop for three hours so my brain is fried and I needed a short mental break, hence I'm now responding to your comment. If you were to walk by my desk every two or three hours you'd see me on Youtube or Slashdot and could easily assume I spent my days doing nothing, meanwhile I'd just finished a difficult task and need a few minutes to "unwind" before starting the next one or I'm about to start a boring menial task and am looking for a podcast to listen to while doing it so I don't go crazy.

It's taken me a good chunk of my life to get over feeling "bothered" by what other people are doing at work or how hard they're working, if you can get the task done quicker than I can that's on me not you so why should I get pissed off if you're able to take off early today - I know next time I'll get my work done faster and leave you sitting here until 8:00 PM. ;-)

They want to "maximize" productivity and are mad about how difficult it is to do when everyone is at home.

Let say they give you a task on a Monday with a deadline of EOD the following Monday, but you finish that task by early Thursday morning. Without any motivation to do so, the company wants you channel your inner Oliver Twist and be all begging to your manager with cries of "Please sir, may I have some more?"

If you're in the office you have to at least make an effort to look busy when you're not, but when you're at home you can sit with your laptop next to you and simply wait until EOD Monday to hand it in and just enjoy a couple days of relaxing while answering the odd e-mail / attending the odd meeting; they absolutely hate the thought of you taking it easy on their dime and want you working every second of every day - if they could make you work on the toilet they would.

This is a good thing! Can't tell you how many times large group "brainstorm" sessions tended to be dominated by a couple of loudmouths or social butterflies, now they're forced to listen when someone's talking about their idea instead of just jumping in with their louder voice to tell you how it won't work because they'd made a snap decision before hearing the whole thing yet.

Now our sessions tend to be more fruitful as the people who often got drowned out in the crowded meeting room get a chance to contribute.

...to use their work credentials on a public site!

Seriously, what an idiot! Hell, for the place I work, I had sign a contract stating that I would use any passwords or secondary credentials used in my personal life to access company systems. I have a password system in place that I use only for work, and I never use that login / password combination anywhere 'cause I have zero desire to get sued into oblivion!

Moron...

This, so much this.

I have a hard time with math, which sucks because it shot a giant hole through my childhood dream of being an astronaut, I just don't "get" the numbers. I understand the concepts and know how to do the calculations, I just can't do them mentally, which is why I got into computers and now work as a Systems Analyst - I tell the computer to the math for me. ;-)

No amount of copying times tables ever had me memorizing that 8 x 7 = 56, and yes I had to use the calculator to do that, because my brain just couldn't handle it. All that copying just became busy work and handwriting practice, but the teacher never understood or cared that I didn't "get" it the same way the other kids did. I knew that 8 x 7 was just another way of saying 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 = 56 but I couldn't do the addition mentally, and writing it down just became work for me so I never really remembered it.

Now I carry around in my pocket the calculator all the teachers told me I wouldn't be able to carry around in my pocket, so I don't worry about it, but as a kid it was tough and I'd get bullied a lot for needing to count on my fingers.

If you're spending $5,200 annually on gas then you're going to spend $52,000 over ten, so you might as well just buy an EV. I bought a 2015 Nissan LEAF back in August 2014 which costs me about $1.75 / 100km to drive - when charging at the reduced "overnight" rate. With 138,000km I'm about $2,415 +/- in electricity costs for a car which cost me just over $30k CDN after taxes and rebates; though I'm actually less than that because my employer offers free charging, making half my daily trip essentially "free".

Going only from a fuel perspective I went from needing to spend $25-$30k on a car with another $52k fuelling it over ten years, coming out to an $82k-ish ten year ownership cost - and we haven't even begun to talk about the expensive ICE maintenance, to about about $35k-ish including fuel over ten years; why do you think there's so much FUD about EVs out there, the oil companies wanted my (and continue to want your) $50k+.

Seriously, it's like a library then? I know when I walk into my local library I head straight for the Science Fiction section, that's what I'm interested in when I have time to read a book. There's tens of thousands of other books of all kinds of genres there, I don't give a crap about them even though I see tonnes of people milling about those shelves whenever I go.

Wait until the author finds out about all the various video and music streaming services too! Way too much music, way too much video! There's thousands of movies, shows, and songs I've never listened to and who cares? Someone else hasn't bothered watching, reading, listening, or playing the stuff I like either. Choice is a good thing.

My only major complaint about Steam, and the other online game stores, is the prevalence of games with an insidious volume of micro transactions designed to get me to spend real money to progress in the game; I can wait three, real time, days for this task to complete or I can spend 50 of the ingame microtransaction currency to do it now and hey if you buy the ingame currency now we'll give you an extra 50% as a bonus but of course we won't tell you that you'll burn through this stuff in less than an hour and now you gotta spend another $9.99 to do it again but you love that dopamine hit don't you?

I miss the old days where you bought a thing and it was yours and the only time you needed to spend more was to get new levels / expansions that made the gameplay better.

They probably could but then they'd have to decide whether it's the Plant itself that gets to travel in time, all the homes connected to it that do, or perhaps both?

That'd be an interesting film or TV series actually, reactor mishap causes an entire modern town circa 2023 and their power plant to travel back to the US Mid-West circa 1700s around the time of America's founding.

EV energy performance has a lot of factors but the largest one is hills.

My 2015 Nissan LEAF, nearly 10 years old now, has lost about 20% of the original capacity but can still reliably get me about 120km in the summer and about 95km - 100km in the winter (depending on heating) - as long as the route it relatively flat. But, for example, there's an IKEA warehouse about 65km away from my house but the elevation drops from about 350m to 100m. Going has me arriving with about 40%-50% battery remaining, but regardless of whether or not I have full charge for the return trip I often need to stop (especially in winter) about 2/3 of the way home at a CHAdeMO station to top up.

If you live in a particularly hilly area, or your daily commute is typically hilly, you'll never hit those kinds of efficiencies because climbing hills takes a TONNE of power compared to flat or downhill. I typically only use the 2015 LEAF for in town now and use my 2018 LEAF for longer trips, but when I have no choice of vehicle for the short hops to the IKEA (usually when I'm buying something big and need both cars to fit it) I find my 2015 works just fine as long as I don't mind stopping at the quick charge on the way home.

Larger packs will mitigate this just by virtue of having a "bigger tank", but the efficiencies won't change much if you've got lots of hills on your route.

I think it's meant in a similar vein as cafeteria food, hear me out.

While they can sometimes make a stellar meal most of the time the food is "just ok", not too spicy, not too bland, but also not anything special. You'll eat it and not feel ripped off, while certain portions of it pique your taste buds just right to become a personal favourite - but you typically wouldn't pick the cafeteria food over a proper restaurant if you had the choice.

I've talked to the kitchen staff at the cafeteria where I work and many of them are certified chefs who want to get creative and make flavourful dishes which cater to the senses, but whenever they do it simply doesn't sell. All too often the people in the building tend to want basic things with familiar tastes that aren't too bland and aren't too spicy.

Meanwhile everyone laments about how the cafeteria seems to never "shake it up", but then can't agree on what "shake it up" means so we all get stuck eating cafeteria food that's "just OK".

A lot of TV is like that too - not too spicy, not too bland, kinda not boring, but also don't really have to pay attention to follow the story. Just the right thing to to have on in the background while you're folding the laundry.

Few people are going to spend the several months of free time it would take to watch all ten seasons of SG-1 in one large binge session. Conversely most won't have a problem watching a couple episodes of the new show each day, especially if they're relatively short, over the next week or so.

My nephew and I totally binged that Jurassic Park cartoon Camp Cretaceous over the course of a couple weekends because we could get three episodes an hour in, whereas our run through of that old classic Knight Rider - he's got a big crush on Bonnie and loves, and wants to own, KITT - has been much slower (we average about one episode a month, currently in the middle of Season 2) because he's gotta be in the mood to sit for the nearly 50 minutes it takes to finish a single story. Same thing here, I'd get around to all of SG-1 eventually but no way I'm binging it for several months straight to do it - it'd probably take me a year or two to get all the way through.

YouTube is basically the equivalent of TV now, except you get to watch what interests you rather than what's spoon fed to you by a team of programmers. I watch quite a bit of it myself and I'm 50!

Shows on how to repair retro computers, how to build a deck / fence / small shed in the backyard, how to safely use a resin 3d printer, battle reports of the games that use the minis I just 3d printed, watching a city planner play Cities Skylines and learning why cities are built the way they are, etc... There's a tonne of interesting content on there these days, commercials are short(ish) and often skipable after 10-15 seconds.

All this is just the same "moral panic" parents had when I was a kid about kids watching too much TV, or them new fangled BBSes, or playing D&D, or listening to KISS albums backwards so you can get the secret messages from Satan. My only concern is that some parents aren't going to be as good at media literacy as others, if their kids aren't being properly monitored they're gonna start watching some pretty sketchy shit that'll teach them that reality isn't real or go down the "manosphere" incel crackpot conspiracy nutter rabbit hole.