It depends entirely on what the consulting is.

Usually you use consultants for one-time or infrequently needed services that would make little sense to maintain staff for. Architecture and engineering services, legal consultation, and advertising are all easy examples of things a business might need but not often enough to have that manpower in-house. Some professional services also carry liability insurance requirements which, if you hire a consultant, you don't have to pay for either.

If you want to talk about something like IT services; Seems likely an IT admin might not be the busiest person in a company, so depending on the size of your business it might make sense to contract for on-call services and remote administration. One person can probably manage 3-4 small businesses worth of tech support and management, so each of those businesses pays less than hiring their own dedicated in-house employee both in salaries and benefits. (And yeah, they are very likely ALSO getting paid less...)
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If I pay on one site, every single other site still has ads. So this locks me into the viewpoints preferred by the curator of one site and to the production values that one site's business model enables.

In theory, that's an argument for adding a "bathroom break" button to groupware more than for RTO. Managers would get metrics to find employees who misuse the break button in excess of what labor law encourages employers to allow.

Ultimately, that depends on the nature of the position. Do you work call center or something else?

I'm in development, not operations, so my manager tends to be more accepting of my habit of dropping offline for an hour at a time to avoid the 23-minute interruption penalty associated with complex problem-solving.

Say an employee with attention deficit or sensory processing disorder uses Teams on a separate device as a way to improve productivity on their primary device. Refusal to accommodate these conditions can get an employer in trouble under the ADA and foreign counterparts. If you end up fired for this, ask an equality lawyer about your options.

> The Japanese have found a way to use small temperature differences to generate electricity

And for about $50 I can buy an engine that runs off the temperature difference between the ambient air and a cup of hot water. The idea of using thermal gradients in the ocean to generate power is at least 150 years old. Any guesses why it's not caught on?

Hint: the facility in Japan you're probably thinking of only generates 100kw (~135HP), and it's not clear if that's before or after they account for the power to pump the seawater.

There is no utility in chasing down such incredibly low quality thermal energy unless you happen to actually want heat, but even then it's not really hot enough for most things you'd want scavenged heat for.
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> Is there no way to do it for data centers?

The water temps are typically barely warm enough for most people's preference for a shower.

> For example, use a heat pump to concentrate the heat to above boiling temperature then use that to boil water to run a steam turbine.

Getting a heat pump to operate at atmospheric boiling water temps is extremely difficult. Remember that to have a working heat pump, you need a refrigerant medium that condenses at the high temperature side under a given pressure and also boils at or below the low temperature side at a given pressure... then, you need to build a machine that can actually create those pressures.

Now consider that most steam cycle powerplants use superheated steam at temps of over 500C. What material could you use that can be made to condense into a liquid at >500C, what kinds of pressures would be required to make that happen, and what could you even build such a machine out of to survive those conditions?

> I think you could run that at a net-positive for power?

The second law of thermodynamics has left you a voicemail...
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If it's anything like their content ID copyright enforcement mechanism, I'm sure this will go absolutely perfect and there will be no drama whatsoever.

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Chrome Web Store and addons.mozilla.org already implement "extensions".

A "page" is an HTML document retrieved through an HTTP or HTTPS URL. I think PPH is proposing enforcing a stricter same-origin policy. Instead of CORS, the document's origin server would have to act as a proxy to retrieve any third-party resources needed by the client-side script.

It's called Jevons Paradox

In short: the more efficiently you can use a resource, the better the ROI you get for investing in the utilization of that resource, and the more people consume.

This applies to computing power. Maybe it doesn't make sense in 1974 for a small business to invest in computer workstations for their staff. But by 1994 computers were so much more powerful, so much more capable, and actually cheaper relative to that capability (read: more efficient) that it now makes no sense to NOT invest in the technology for your business.

If this succeeds in lowering the barrier to entry for leasing AI data center resources, expect demand to go up as more people try to do more things.
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Look man, I know actually understanding things isn't your strong suit but white-knighting Roblox is not a good look.

Yes, religious organizations have been and still very much are a hotbed for child abuse and assault. I fully agree we should be doing a lot more to investigate and incarcerate offenders among the clergy and related professions.

But even if I accept it's "the primary vector of attack" - and these days I'm not entirely convinced that's true anymore - it does you no favors to handwave literal tens of thousands if incident reports associated with Roblox. 13,000 reports from Roblox in 2023 alone. And that's Roblox reporting them... given how much effort they put into protecting predators on their platform, if they themselves reported 13K incidents you can imagine the real number is much larger.

Maybe imagine that Roblox is like a Jesus Camp with 70+ million children attending every day and there are zero safeguards in place.
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> We have decades and decades of studies on this. Children are going to be assaulted and taken advantage of by people they know who are in positions of power.

"People they know" include people they make friends with online.

"Positions of power" include people who offer money (robux) in exchange for favors.

Yes, we should be putting a lot more priests and cops in prison for child abuse and exploitation, but Roblox is a MASSIVE playground for exploitation and fishing. This has been an open secret for years with a fairly recent media fiasco involving Schlep. Apparently Roblox was more interested in banning him and any mention of him on their platform for the high crime of reporting predators to the authorities than they are about actually punishing those predators at all.

> But whatever the case going after Roblox isn't going to save any children.

You are either fucked in the head if you believe this, or scared of getting caught yourself.
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Then you would be wrong. Probably best to recuse yourself from weighing in on this dicsussion.

> If they are not grown in dirt that has arsenic in it

Good luck finding dirt that doesn't. It is present naturally in topsoils everywhere, and because of the way rice fields are commonly irrigated, those fields tend to have higher than typical amounts. The the rice itself is exceptionally good at absorbing it.

Not so say it's ever a dangerous quantity; actually getting arsenic poisoning from eating rice is vanishingly rare. That's kind of the point I was making; if your response to protein supplements containing toxic metals is to just eat natural proteins, bear in mind that natural proteins ALSO contain toxic metals... and you just happened to choose the worst two crops for your example.
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> Rice and beans

Rice is abnormally high in arsenic compared to other grains, especially brown rice. Legumes seem to have a higher affinity for heavy metals like lead, mercury, and cadmium compared to other plants, to the point where they are actively studied for potential use in cleaning pollution from fields.

Delicious.
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