In todays political and social climate, even "otherwise following the health guidelines" has been politicized. I know plenty of people on both left and right who see mask wearing/not wearing as a sign of political allegiance. e.g. "I wear a mask even while jogging outdoors in a deserted park because I don't want to be mistaken for a republican" / "I'll never wear one of those face-diapers because I don't want people to think I'm a liberal". It's just cheerleading for their team, nothing to do with real concern for actual health and safety.

Then most of the anti vaxxer rhetoric would be couched in leftist terms. Remember a few years ago when the right was making fun of the hippies in california for refusing to vaccinate their kids and outbreaks of whooping cough and measles were happening?

Do you have a source for that? From what I remember of physiology and various safety trainings for entry into various labs and confined spaces, the urge to breathe is caused by an increase in CO2 concentration. That's why a confined space which has had the oxygen displaced is so dangerous. You'll continue to breathe as normal, expelling CO2 and thinking everything is fine. Then hypoxia kicks in, you'll be unconscious seconds later, and dead a few minutes after that.

My parents are in their 70s and victims of never having to learn any technology due to me living with them until my mid 20s. Even they can figure out how to open ip cam viewer on their phone. It's literally as simple as amcrest camera-->point IP cam viewer at the cameras IP address (you can even configure it once and pass on the configuration via QR code)-->done. Mix in some static DHCP reservations, port forwarding, dynamic DNS services, and non-standard ports to taste if you want it accessible remotely.

Have you considered using local cameras? IP cameras are dirt cheap these days. Put them on their own vlan, poke a hole or two in your router, and with a dynamic IP service and something like IP cam viewer on your phone you've got basically the same functionality with none of the cloud BS.

That isn't really true for anything in the solar system though. Everything influences everything else, we just like to pretend that there are only two bodies involved to simplify the calculations. Even if we impose some other kind of qualifier (e.g. "at least 99% of its orbit is influenced by the sun"), it still gets fuzzy when you start getting far away because at pluto-esque distances, a close small object can influence your orbit a lot more than the massive distant object.

If that were the case, then we wouldn't see tests like this that deliberately go well above the actual operational parameters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As a really simple example, if you know that a given material will deflect by x for y amount of force, you know that the relationship is linear for a given range of y, and you know that the expected amounts of y are going to result in too little deflection to accurately measure; it would make sense to test at a higher value of y so as to have an easier time measuring x and then extrapolate back to get the values at the operational range.

Without knowing what went into the specs, that's impossible to determine though. Maybe the sub will never see -100, but I suspect the point of the test was to do something more than make it really cold and go "yup, it's still in one piece". There could be a safety factor built in, or maybe something else entirely. e.g. say they're trying to measure the effect of something that gets more exaggerated with lower temperatures, it could make sense to cool it further than it'll ever see in the real world in order to provide a bigger result to measure and then extrapolate back.

I suppose you could give the neighbor access to the camera. If it has a good view of both your properties, it would make sense for both of you to be able to view it anyway (they might even stop demanding for it to be blacked out).

So what was her response to "of course not. You said not to point it at your house so I re-aimed it" ?

If you're referencing challenger, I think the PR hit wasn't so much that there were civilians on board, but the willful negligence that went into creating that disaster.

That's still the best option, but nowadays you have to sign a transfer agreement beforehand if you want any hope of it not becoming a tangled mess of soul crushing incompetent bureaucracy when you try to transfer your units.

They still count as credits, they're just not accepted as counting towards your degree at the new school. As a personal example from the mid 2000's: the community college where I did my GEs offered two different math tracks. Either one counted towards getting your associates in CS, but if you transferred into the state system with the wrong track in your transcript, you'd find yourself having to take remedial math again if you wanted to finish your bachelors. Luckily I avoided that pitfall with a transfer agreement, but they still got me for an extra semester by adding a new requirement for "rhetoric" classes and claiming that those GEs didn't count from the community college level.

Sure, to not take the option would be leaving money on the table. I'm not saying don't take it if it's offered, I'm questioning Amazons motives.

Amazon really isn't interested in promoting their hourly workers up the chain, Bezos has said that himself. When Joe Boxstacker gets his associates in sociology and applies for a management role, they'll still pass him over for an outside hire. They want turnover in their hourlies, and they want it to be as "voluntary" as possible so that they can minimize their unemployment taxes. So why are they really offering education benefits?

A halfway completed degree is a huge waste. Employers don't care (I'd even say it counts as a negative on a resume, you can't finish what you started), and the ratio of "useful knowledge that will help me later on no matter what" vs "useless fluff that I'm just doing to get this piece of paper that says I can work" is quite low in todays college environments.

And they can yank that incentive a lot easier than they can yank wages or hours.

Sure, maybe back when you went to college in 1960 with your generation of boomers. These days it's a maze of competing and conflicting standards, and I've not yet met somebody who was able to successfully transfer every one of their classes across schools without losing at least half a semesters worth. Add in time (a lot of classes start dropping off after ~4 years), differences between semester and quarter systems, differences between state and private school systems, and somebody who's already overwhelemed between balancing work, classes, and now trying to navigate a colleges bureaucracy, and you've got a recipe for trouble.

Amazon knows this, and knows that they can use those benefits as additional leverage to get employees chasing after what's essentially a sunk cost.

Way to assume the dumbest possible interpretation of what I said. If you take a few classes here and a few classes there, you'll start finding out that some of them don't transfer, or that the credit is no longer considered valid after a certain amount of time. iirc from my time in a state college, there were even limits on how long you could go without taking classes before you had to go through the whole application and acceptance process again.

Last I checked, halfway completed degrees aren't really worth much of anything. If Amazon arbitrarily yanks your education benefits (those are wayyyy less regulated than wages or hours), and you were only able to take classes because of those benefits, basically all of those classes were for naught unless you can figure out how to get started on them again sooner rather than later.

They also hand over a very strong carrot/stick combo to have lorded over them. Once they've sunk a couple of years worth of nights and weekends into college classes, a threat to take it away (and therefore "waste" all of that sunk time) is a pretty powerful one.