Nuclear, gas, coal, etc doesn't run out.

Tell that to Texas who "ran out" of natural gas during the last big freeze forcing multiple power plants to shutdown for several days. :)

All sources of power generation can run out. The trick is to diversify your power generation across multiple types of sources (nuclear, gas, solar, hydro, wind, tidal, etc) so that an outage in one source won't affect the overall grid. And interconnection between grids, between regions are also needed (again, see Texas for reason why).

And how are they going to know if you've unplugged them or not? The servers they communicate with are offline, so there's no remote way of knowing if the kiosks are still plugged in.

All the tap-to-pay terminals around here present a tip option first where you can choose a pre-set %, enter a custom %, enter a custom $ amount, or skip. It displays the new total, you click OK, and then tap the terminal to authorise the payment.

Signatures aren't required for anything payment related in Canada. Signatures are required for paper contracts.

Please don't lump Canada and Mexico in with the US when it comes to anything financial. :) They're a third world unto themselves when it comes to banking. Canada moved to chip+pin back in the 90s, and enabled NFC (tap) transactions in the early 2000s. (Not sure about Mexico, but considering how backward the US is, pretty much anything is more forward-looking.)

I mean, Americans think Apple invented tap-to-pay, which tells you a lot about how far behind they are in payment tech.

Prices at the pump are currently lower than they were prior to the new carbon tax increase coming online.

In BC, it's almost 20c/L less expensive now than in April.

In Alberta, it's only 5c less, but that's still lower.

https://charts.gasbuddy.com/ch...

âoeThe number of AI related regulations in the U.S. has risen significantly in the past year and over the last five years.â

Once it is clear just how small government can be made by replacing Betty Catlady (she, her, hers) in the Dept. of WTF with AI Betty, expect important Betty protections to fill the regulatory pipeline.

Roku Premiere+ and Ultra models (the larger square boxes) support 100 Mbps Ethernet via built-in RJ45 ports.

The soundbar models also support Ethernet, albeit via a USB adapter.

It's only the Express, Streaming Stick, and similar models (the "sticks") that are wireless only. These are also the crappiest hardware in their lineup and should be avoided except as test setups.

Yeah, we were outdoor power centers and strip malls, the indoor guys had it a lot rougher as far as effectively retenanting their space, but again I really doubt they spent a nanosecond worrying about what the mall across town thought about them lowering the $/sq ft on their space if they could get a deal done to keep an anchor and keep the space alive.

I'm trading my time for money, WFH gives me the ultimate perk, 20% of my time spent for my employer back as the commute time is eliminated. All the free coffee and subsidized lunches they could offer are but a pittance in comparison.

That might be true in commercial real-estate but I can tell you from a decade of doing retail IT that it's got butkis to do with things in shopping centers, what other companies care about isn't even a whiff of a concern. They're focused on total profit for the portfolio and occupancy rates, you do whatever deals need to be done to keep the centers full even if you know that it's not going to be super advantageous at the end of the 10 year period because as long as you have the retailers coming to you for space you'll get them back when they need space to expand and the market is tight. Now for commercial this might be a fundamental shift in the market where occupancy is never going to rebound, but you take the one time hit to mark to market your portfolio and recapitalize to redevelop the property or sell it at firesale prices to the bottom feeders in the market. I mean if occupancy is that low you're probably going to get called on your loan covenants by the banks anyways at some point, so waiting for them to do it for you has to be worse than just biting the bullet and renting it out at whatever the true market value is.

180C is apparently the hottest we've managed to run a heat pump:
https://ammonia21.com/norwegia...
Not yet commercially viable and just demonstrated in a lab unit within the last few years, so probably 5 years from running a demo plant. Still, I can see running such a pump as the input to a thermal battery as being a great proof of concept use case, there's no critical load depending on the heat output being available 24x7 so any need to tinker, troubleshoot, or maintain the prototype can easily be accomplished.

The extra magnets align the charging coil and receiving coil to minimize power loss and heat generation, it's actually a useful feature that I wish had been in the original Qi standard.

Just like the original law called for micro-USB, if technology comes along and there's a new superior plug format that would make sense to use to supplant USB-C then there will be a new updated law passed. For the next decade or more I think USB-C will be fine for phones, 240W and 80Gbps is going to be enough for quite some time.

Look at productivity vs real wages and you'll realize that the "union nonsense" has been a long time coming. The top 1% have reaped almost all the gains for FAR too long and now that the baby boomers are retiring there's a labor squeeze and the working class realizes that there's a once in several generation chance to seize back some of the gains for themselves. I'm sure that will lead to some further automation, but that was going to happen anyways as the technology developed (ie I've never seen a management type say we shouldn't implement this automation because it might cause someone to lose their job, quite the opposite) so getting some wage concessions now while the capitalists don't have much choice is the obvious good move.

Two clients downloading from Steam will easily saturate 2Gbps, if you've got a backup client on a few machines you can also easily saturate your upload bandwidth doing your backups. I mean sure, if all you want to do is browse the web and watch videos (even 4k), then it's massive overkill, but there's plenty of existing use cases where it will be useful at least some of the time, and if more people had the bandwidth there'd be even more since information is like a gas that expands to fill whatever container is available.