They use the arm trucks where I live too, and literally no part of this county is well-off. But they only use them for recycling and yard waste, both of which are only retrieved from their official cans which are designed to be picked up by it. Trash is picked up by 2-man teams of driver and... trash chucker? Whatever you call the guy who ride on the back of the truck and hopes you don't drive up his ass.
This is all really up to state law, USPS has standards for the mailbox itself but only makes recommendations about what you should put it on. They do suggest that you use a pole that swings away or is knocked over easily to avoid causing harm to people who hit your mailbox pole. This is a distinctly different thing from barriers preventing people from crashing into your house.
I lived in a house on a back road which was a traditional venue for mailbox baseball. The owners put up a very sturdy metal post (some kind of machine tool stand) and a mailbox made out of 1/4" steel. On one occasion I did find a shattered piece of an old 2x4 near the mailbox. Gotcha, you little pecker.
Seems to me like if a person in the US really wants to get a good revenge on mailbox busters, rather than an indestructible mailbox, they should install some cameras good enough to get plates. Vandalizing a mailbox is a federal crime punishable by fines up to $250,000 as well as up to 3 years in jail.
I'm surprised the courts have never ruled that car-centric transportation planning a violation of the 14th amendment, ADA, or something else.
This will probably happen in California eventually, but we're far from being able to provide alternate transportation at the state level at this point. If the HSR ever gets completed (ha ha) it will have various types of interconnections to essentially the entire state. The plan is for remote counties like Humboldt to be connected by an express bus. But getting to that bus is still going to suck for some of us if we try to do it on public transport, because for example if you live in Rio Dell then the bus only comes every two hours, and if you live in a lot of the towns around here it doesn't go there at all.
I took the bus to work for a couple of months, it was awful. Literally any car which is reliable would be better. I wound up with a Versa, it's surprisingly good, and a million times better than relying on the bus. Humboldt used to have a rail line running through it, but parts of it were in particularly poor locations and other parts were just abandoned. You can see them clearly from the highway in a lot of locations, mostly with trees grown up between the rails, and in other places with rails running through midair where the rail bed has washed away.
The actors in the article sound entitled too. They don't have a right to acting jobs.
No, but they do have a right to their likenesses, and if those were used to train this AI then they have a rational legal argument to make that it should not have been.
Are we morally obligated to free the robot slaves instead of destroying them?
1) You're not morally obligated to free anyone trying to kill you unless you can do it with less loss of your life than otherwise
2) The robots aren't going to be intelligent any time soon, so you don't have to feel bad about terminating them.
Better drones have obstacle avoidance. This is, or at least should be, embarrassing. You can get a LIDAR range sensor with over 100M range for like $200 now, and that's if you just buy one.
If they are unconcerned about being defeated, we (people who don't want to be succeeded by software) should defeat them now (before it's too late) and stop their mad quest to replace humanity with a more capable successor. At best they'll be wiping out humanity with eventual navel gazers, at worst they'll be producing berserkers, and actually succeeding at polluting space.
What do we want? Butlerian Jihad!
When do we want it? Before we replace ourselves!
FFS.
Oh FFS, how many times does the word "baseload" have to be mentioned before people like you get it?
No matter how many times you say it, it won't change the fact that what we need is not baseload, it's load-following.
the sun doesn't shine at night
But there is wind at night, and meanwhile we use the most power during the day, when the sun is shining.
you can't just rely on batteries, they can't store enough power for more than a few hours unless you have a storage unit the size of a small hill
So we build more storage. For example, EVs, more and more of which are supporting V2G. It's not rocket surgery.
Fusion power might help solve the nuclear waste problem with nuclear power, and it should solve the hazard problem. But it's also not just a few years or a few billion dollars away. If we're talking about where to spend money, then the place to spend it right now is obviously renewables. And one of the ways we can help make that feasible is to force frivolous bullshit like "AI" to make hay while the sun shines — that is, for any large consumers which can delay their power consumption until peak times to do so. Obviously there are industrial processes which cannot reasonably be paused (like making steel, or fruit paste) but there are plenty which can be, and they should.
Amazon is the cheapest and most convenient place online to buy groceries with EBT. 12.3 percent of US residents receive SNAP benefits. 10% of them have a disability, and 39% are in a household with at least one member who is elderly or disabled.
What's the deal with Temu anyway? I went there expecting to find some bargains and everything I looked up was more expensive than Amazon.
I'm not in the US, you guys don't have online shops that aren't Amazon?
Of course we do. We have a number of options. But in general Amazon's prices are lower, and they ship faster, and they are more graceful about returns. People use Amazon for actual reasons.
as mentioned in the summary, their search engine is shit and their prices higher.
Yes, but IME all search engines are shit now, since Google has enshittified. Most [r]etail sites' search engines are absolute dogshit. Again IME, the best search is eBay's. eBay sellers seem willing to enter more metadata than other kinds of sellers, so you can use the category-specific search options to find products with a granularity that you can't anywhere else except a few hardware (as in nuts and bolts) and electronic component [r]etailers. McMaster-Carr, Digi-Key, you can find things there.
You know what site has really and truly the worst searches? Aliexpress. My sweet god, it is absolute dogshit. Not only is there absolutely obscene product placement (they insert shit they wish you would buy and think you might buy into absolutely every search) but filtering by price ascending hides most of the results, including things which actually did match my keywords. It's too bad that Google has gotten so bad recently, because I used to have very good luck finding things on Aliexpress using Google.
Glass can be recycled unlimited times, while plastic tends to degrade over time. I think the main reason is that glass melts at a higher temperature and you basically burn off the labels and other crap.
The additives in plastic are volatile. That's why they leach readily. The additives in glass aren't. They stay in the glass when you re-melt it. Both glass and plastic have to be clean before you recycle them or you get impure output.
The reason PTFE is so good at its job is that it's very stable, so it's not surprising the rats are not metabolizing it. If they were smoking it, that would be another story. But the quantities of microplastics are so minute that they are not going to move the needle there.
My big concern about microplastics is that they will lodge in delicate places (which we already know to be true) and then release toxic chemical compounds into their surrounds, which we know is something plastics do. For example, all plastic beverage containers leach toxic compounds into their contents.
More likely designed for gamers, I'd think. They seem most likely to believe that more is always better.
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. -- John Muir
