Right, that's pretty typical. I'm not sure there's really any solution that's much better than having someone go to the house after it burns and turn the manual cutoff valve under the water meter cover.

Because again, any electronic solution is going to depend on that antenna on top of the cover, which is likely to burn to a crisp, not to mention that every electrically operated valve I've ever dealt with has a tendency to fail with alarming regularity, so that would be a huge maintenance headache on an ongoing basis all to limit the harm in the event of a relatively rare failure mode.

The CDN already likely knows when I visit both sites, because they're serving the main page of both sites. This is about as scary to me as "Your computer is sending out an IP address" ads.

Welcome to a world where everything has to be bid out to an outside construction company and takes 10x as long as if you just hired the people yourself.

It tells them that you have been to a site that uses a particularly resource, but not what site. You could just as easily have previously visited a site that uses the above approach to guess what sites you have been to.

So at best, it violates your privacy exactly once, and because the user might have hit such a browser profiling site previously in incognito mode, you can't be certain even once unless your list of resources changes rapidly.

Given a choice, unless I'm missing something, I think I'd rather have the hard-to-meaningfully-exploit loss of privacy than the performance hit, particularly if separate Incognito mode windows end up effectively becoming cacheless as a result, which they presumably would if you really want to fully prevent that.

Or just introduce a minimum time threshold for returning a resource that is large enough to be plausibly a load action, add some reasonably large amount of randomness around that minimum, and call it a day.

That's a questionable way of looking at it. In practice, the value of your house hasn't gone up by 300%. The value of the land under it has gone up by 3000% and the value of the home has gone up by 30%. The actual cost of rebuilding the house in place has gone up, but that is likely to be only a fraction of the cost of the home, because a lot of the value comes from the location.

That's actually only a little bit below the average for California, so yes, you can. You'll probably also want to add earthquake coverage, though, which will double that number. And if you're living in a fire-prone area, that number probably isn't even close. But that isn't completely impossible by any means.

Nope. And your source doesn't actually say that. The reservoir was, in fact, offline for previously scheduled maintenance. It was not offline because of a shortage of water. Unless by "California water management", you mean California repairing their reservoirs, in which case you're technically correct — the best kind of correct — but misleading to such a degree that you might as well not be.

Do you realize how far away that reservoir is? Firefighting needs lakes and reservoirs a few miles away, not an eight-hour round-trip flight away. You can put in all the reservoirs you want in northern California and it still won't help when the fire is in southern California. We're talking about nearly the distance from Tennessee to New Orleans here.

I can't find any sources other than NY Post (which is pretty unreliable) that corroborate that story. Contemporary stories written at the time suggest that LADWP was fined for the damage their crews caused while replacing the poles, which implies that they did, in fact, replace the poles, but did so in a manner that caused a lot of damage.

And that's a reasonable outcome. When you're cutting brush with a bulldozer to get to those poles, you have a legal obligation to go around any endangered plants. This goes without saying. Nothing prevented them from doing the work — only from being grossly reckless in doing so.

Again, NY Post is a tabloid. You might as well be posting stories from the National Enquirer. And there are crazy people everywhere. Want to blame someone? Blame Ronald Reagan for not finding ways to work around Supreme Court decisions regarding involuntary commitment of people with serious psychological problems, which resulted in most of them ending up homeless and on the streets.

The rest of your post is more of the same, and appears to blame entire groups of people for the actions of a few. That sort of thinking makes the world a worse place, and I would urge you to think a bit more about what would happen if you lived in a place where people like you were in the minority, and whether you would like to be treated with suspicion and contempt for it, and then treat others the way you would want to be treated. Just saying.

Anything automatic is going to burn when the house does. About all you can realistically do is shut off water to everything but the hydrants, and that doesn't need to be automatic. In fact, it is probably better for it to be manual to maximize the chances of it surviving.

Fear will keep the smart employees away, not working for this HR station.

It doesn't work for any organization that isn't full of sociopaths. Normal people care about their coworkers, and are unhappy when they leave. The more people are forced to leave involuntarily, the more it hurts everyone.

And so you fire the HR and corporate security teams, the cafeteria staff, and all the other teams that exist only to hire, protect, or feed the people who contribute to revenue. That way of thinking doesn't end well.

Or you fire the legal compliance team, because they only take away from revenue.

The reality is that in any company, there are things you have to do, and they don't make the company money, but you still have to do them, because if you don't, bad things happen. Those are really hard to account for. :-)

Yup. Bad management tends to not know what the problems are. If they knew what the problems were, they would have identified them already and fixed them, either by getting rid of the employees or moving them to a team where they are a better fit.

Assessment methods that depend on a single performance review are, in fact, highly skewed by random chance.

• Everybody has cycles where they are distracted every now and then. Life happens.
• Everybody has cycles where management priorities shift and the result is that all of their effort was wasted. Shift happens.
• Everybody has cycles where some big project doesn't get finished and they can't show that they completed any big projects. Slip happens.
• Everybody has cycles where something unpredictable goes wrong that was caused by something that they did. S**t happens.

And when some of those things just happen to occur right at the end of a performance review cycle, they get far more weight than they do if they happen at the beginning of the cycle. That part is 100% random chance. So random chance plays a statistically significant role in everyone's ranking in a given cycle.

And none of that is necessarily under the control of the employee, and none of it necessarily represents an actual performance problem, but rather, is a reflection of the fact that nobody is perfect and life isn't perfect.

As a result, yes, in any given cycle, you might have 5% who didn't contribute meaningfully to the bottom line, but it won't usually be the same 5% in the next cycle. If you fire the 5% each cycle, all you're doing is making more work for the employees that stay while paying them the same amount, and eventually you'll reach a point of maximum burnout where quality falls through the floor and nothing gets done.

Put another way, that approach to managing is exactly why Facebook sucks as badly as it does. The people they should want to hire take one look at stories like this and say, "I don't want to work at a company where if I have a bad quarter, they're going to fire me," and they don't even bother to apply for jobs.

I'm not saying that it isn't possible to tell the difference on an individual case-by-case basis, but when management is pushing you to identify a specific quota of people to be fired, that ship has sailed, and the only thing those sorts of quotas do is make people over the age of 30 say, "H*** no, I'm not ever going to work for you." So you end up with a bunch of junior talent that can't project-manage their way out of a paper bag, chase new features instead of fixing bugs, don't provide enough test coverage to avoid introducing the same bugs over and over again, etc.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Any manager who thinks feelings and emotions don't play into productivity is going to find out the hard way, through retention issues and mounting training costs as they turn their departments into revolving doors. For a while, they'll probably be able to suckhole up to their superiors that Millennials and Gen Zers are all lazy no-good-for-nothing layabouts, but sooner or later someone is going to find that the manager is a fucking prick.

Like it or not, human beings are, save for a few very aberrant members, a species in possession of emotions, needing at least some validation and some basic level of respect and recognition of dignity. This can be partially overcome if you pay people fuck tons of money; in which case naked self-interest will take over from where normal emotional recognition between superior and subordinate ought to fit in, but what we generally see is mediocre pay and abuse, and astonishment from the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg, being part of the small aberrant group of H. sapiens, that people don't seem all that keen.

I'm glad you're not my supervisor.

People have as much of an inalienable to right control the use of their property as you do to say your piece. If you find that some website, newspaper or soapbox location wishes to silence you, then you find a new location for your soapbox. Private property is not the commons, and never has been. I have an absolute right to remove you from my property if you say things I don't like.