You may think that was a joke, but... how much of the cost is actually wasted? Probably a lot.

I'm reminded of the big floods of a few years back and the millions of dollars (mostly in federal funds) most small cities required to handle cleanup.

Meanwhile, Grand Forks ND (harder hit than most) had their cleanup job done by a local contractor for $65,000.

You can pass over ads in printed media or online. On TV or radio it eats up your time.

Nah, I'm pushing 50 :) School decades ago.

That's what I thought too -- so I was astonished to find (so far) two of 'em here in Montana.

Then there was always the question as to whether Tandy was using it as a money laundry...

The main reason I seldom shopped there back when RS stores were everywhere, was that the prices were so high on stuff I could get elsewhere for a lot less, even locally. Now they're lower priced on some stuff, but it's too late to attract back that business.

BTW the local RS dude assures me that he owns his business... what happens to those guys when RS goes tits-up??

Alibaba is like a swapmeet, they aren't the vendor, just the aggregator. I've bought stuff from Alibaba vendors (one I already knew from ebay), and probably will again. If I have to buy cheap Chinese crap, I might as well pay cheap Chinese prices for it. I see no reason to pay some importer's astounding markup (which even at the wholesale level can exceed 500%) when I can get it straight from the manufacturer at the factory price.

My former fixed-wireless provider (which was a one-man band) bought bandwidth bulk direct from AT&T, and resold it however he liked. Why can't a fiber co-op do the same?

(Seriously, if there's a reason, enlighten me.)

Maybe that initial $lotsofmoney lump should be prorated on a per-user basis per-month, so if you had benefit from the beginning, you pay from the beginning of service. And if someone leaves and another user takes their slot, why should they pay what the previous person already paid, when they didn't get benefit of it til they arrived.

This is basically how road improvement taxes work (at least here) -- the cost is apportioned among all parcels served (ie. all users) and continues for N-many years per parcel (per user slot) regardless of who owns each parcel.

Rabies vaccination is not for the sake of the dog -- that's just a positive side effect.

The real reason rabies vacc is mandatory in much of the developed world is for protection of humans, because rabies is so readily transmissible, and is (with single-digit exceptions) 100% fatal. Annually there are about 55,000 human deaths from rabies, worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Incidentally, there have been a few cases of 'rescue' dogs imported from third-world countries, arriving with active rabies infections.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...

Hey man, he saved one whole byte doing that.

So I've been in meetings all day, then finally get home and I saw this story on /.'s feed. I thought, "ah, it'll be good for some immature homo jokes"

Thank you, /., you did not disappoint. I'm crying from laughing so hard at the from the inane, puerile jokes that I seek out at times likes these.
If you don't like that, well fuck you, too.

My observation even back when I was last in school, over 4 decades ago, was that teachers went out of their way to recruit girls for everything math/science-related -- and that has been going on at least since the late 1960s.

But you can't 'engage' anyone (of any group, for any subject) if they aren't interested. And no amount of 'demonstrating effort' will change that.

Well, the solution is obvious. Park somewhere else and walk in, or hitch a ride with some lesser unfortunate.

There are materials that discourage bacterial and fungal growth. But seems to me an occasional spritz of bleach would do for most of it, and otherwise, let it dry out at night (daytime temps are not going to sterilize it anyway).

And without light, very little will grow in a clay pot.

I have a 5 gallon plastic jug that I filled from a friend's well (from an outdoor faucet so hardly sterile) back in 1984, and kept for an emergency water supply. As of a couple years ago I'd used about half of it and both water and jug were still pristine.

Actually, ordinary swamp cooler design doesn't use a huge amount of water, since it recycles whatever flows through the pads without evaporating. Probably maxes around 10 gallons evaporated per day in extremely hot dry weather, but that's enough to cool a medium-sized house by a good 40 degrees (and keep your eyeballs from turning to raisins).

The fact that the little pump can move up to 20 gallons an hour doesn't mean that water just gets flushed out and lost -- rather, it dribbles down the pads to the base of the unit and is pumped back up. With a heat exchanger, the water system could be closed and could have little or no loss.