But what if I promise the friend to whom I sold the device that I'll fix it if it breaks. Doesn't that make me an authorized repair provider?

Then don't do that. If you can't guarantee parts availability, you shouldn't be promising you'll fix it if it breaks. Don't make promises you're unable to keep.

It's unlikely to be a problem in the real world, though, because these things are enforced by complaint. Unless your friend chooses to sue you in small claims court or something, the government will never find out about it. A big company like Apple or Google won't be able to get by hoping nobody complains when they're selling millions of widgets in California.

No, taking sand out of the oceans is not a good solution. Some of the other posters have calculated the amount of sand we're removing is something like 1% of the added volume from melting ice. There's no practical way to remove enough stuff from the ocean to make space for all that melting water.

Meanwhile, depositing sediment is important to fight coastal erosion. Currents and waves are constantly removing sand from beaches and washing it out into deeper parts of the ocean. Unless that sand is replenished, the coast will erode, making areas close to the coast more vulnerable to flooding from high tides and storm surges. This is really bad, because we tend to take the sand from close to where it will be used, meaning right by the big cities we're most worried about.

There's also extensive literature on ideal working hours, and basically all of it says the standard 40 hour workweek is the maximum employees should routinely be asked to do. That doesn't stop a lot of managers from demanding 50, 60, or more hour workweeks. Many managers base their decisions on "common sense" thinking rather than looking at the best evidence.

The thing about Amazon is that they were first but they don't do ANY of what they do particularly well and the tech isn't particularly complicated.

Maybe this is true of the storefront, but they're way ahead of everyone on the fulfillment logistics on the back end. Nobody is going to be able to set up their kind of delivery network without a huge investment. Not to mention that they have a big advantage from being an established player. Just think about how many people are signed up for Prime, for instance, which serves to lock people in as Amazon customers. There's a reason they don't have any real competitors, even with all their problems.

They are offering someone $25K to live in New York City for 9 months.

Not exactly. The job will be in New York City when it appears, but there's no condition on the $25K that says they have to move there right away. The woman in the article had lined up an apartment in New York, but she was able to find someone to sublet it to. Instead, she's going to spend at least a few months visiting Southeast Asia. If she wanted to live in NYC, she could still look for a job doing something she could easily quit when the real job shows up- there are lots of service industry jobs that are easy to take and easy to leave- and the $25K would make those 9 months a lot more comfortable.

I don't know if they're trying to sound sympathetic or just factual. I will just say that the time to worry about how being in jail will affect your ability to prepare for trial is before you violate the terms of your bail, not after. The dude had his chance. He really does not deserve any sympathy for blowing it.

The money isn't for nothing. They're being paid to stay loyal to their future employer rather than look for a similar job that starts sooner. Giving up the opportunity to look for a job that will give them similar pay and long-term prospects but start sooner is a serious ask, so the companies have to make it worth their while.

Guess how many people knew how to convert between things like fl-oz to quarts/gallons, miles to yards/feet etc i.e. everything they use daily.

I'm not sure if that means what you think it means. What it says to me is that people use different units for different things, and they rarely use those conversion factors. If people regularly converted feet to miles, they'd have the conversion factor memorized. In practice, they rarely if ever do, so that conversion factor is basically a piece of trivia rather than vital knowledge.

That's not to say it's a bad idea to use easy to remember conversion factors between units. On those occasions where it is necessary to convert meters to kilometers, the conversion factor is right there in the unit prefix, while for feet and miles most people would have to look it up. But the fact most people can get away with looking up that conversion when they need it rather than having it memorized is a sign it isn't very important, not that people have failed to learn something critical.

The way we do taxes in the US is emblematic of so many of the problems with our society. Taxes were complicated, so people turned to tax preparers for help. Once there was a profitable tax preparation industry, the problem of difficult taxes became entrenched. The tax preparation industry now lobbies hard to prevent any attempt to fix taxes and make them easy enough to file without assistance. Once you know the basic pattern, you start seeing it everywhere.

Add to that... if it was such crucial research that losing samples in a single freezer cost them $1M in damages, they should have taken precautions to not have all their samples in one freezer, and should have had battery backup or some such thing for said freezer.

There are a whole lot of things they could have done to prevent this from ever happening. The biggest one is having spares ready to go. It's unusual for a janitor to power a freezer off, but electrical and mechanical failures are a fact of life. If the university has freezers with $1 million in samples, it can afford to have a spare or three in a store room somewhere ready to swap when one of their freezers starts to fail. If they had moved their precious samples into a working freezer the moment the alarm started to go off, none of this would have happened.

The university is suing the company they hired the janitors from for damages, and I can understand why. That said, there's plenty of blame to go around here. I also work in a lab, and we don't assume the cleaning staff knows what they're doing when they get here. Training them on what they should and shouldn't touch is part of our job, both because cleaning labs is specialized work and because each lab has its own requirements on top of any general rules.

It's also the university's fault for subcontracting instead of hiring the cleaning staff themselves. They thought they were saving some money by going with the lowest bidder, but now it turns out it cost them. They should have their own cleaning staff who they can train to their own standards rather than trusting someone else. It might cost a bit more in direct costs, but it will save a lot in the long run.

This doesn't compute if you don't have an emergency then why are you calling emergency services?

If you're lost or injured, you have a genuine emergency. If you're charged for getting rescued, you may decide to try to toughing it out rather than calling for help. Sometimes you're able to solve your problem by yourself and you can resolve the emergency without outside assistance, but that doesn't mean it wasn't an emergency.

The problem comes when trying to solve the emergency makes it worse. This happens all the time. People try to find their way out and get even more lost, try to walk out on an injured leg and wind up running out of food, or whatever. That's something we really want to avoid, and the best way to avoid it is not to penalize people for asking for help. It's counterintuitive, but more frequent, less severe rescues may be cheaper than rare but expensive ones, so asking people to pay may make things more expensive and dangerous overall.

This is a good start, but I also want them to make the companies be more up front about how much the price will go up after the introductory rate expires. They love advertising about their $30/month package, but they don't mention it will balloon to $100 or more after a year. Even better, just ban the practice of having that kind of low introductory rate. It's deceptive and depends on consumers feeling locked in once they're used to the service.

I understand why people want to bill for on-land SAR, but I think it's a long-term foolish policy, at least today when people can call for their own rescue. Charging people for rescue discourages them from asking for help until they're desperate. That often means they've either gotten themselves into worse (and more expensive) trouble and/or that they're less capable of helping rescuers to find them. It would probably be cheaper overall to have more distress calls but have more of those calls be simple ones than to discourage people from calling until the situation is really dire.

That's not to say we shouldn't charge people when they shouldn't have been out there in the first place. If you want to go mountaineering when there's a blizzard in the forecast or into the desert without enough water when it's forecast to be 110ÂF, you should have to pay for the inevitable rescue. But if you're just doing something normal and happen to get lost, you shouldn't be afraid to ask for help the moment you know you're in trouble.

This is an obvious enough problem that people have been predicting it for a long time. It's still critical to have what was just a hunch confirmed by a serious study. The worrisome part is that AI generated stuff is rarely marked as such, so it will be very difficult for corpus curators to filter it out. It will be crucial to maintain an old, uncontaminated corpus.