Ok, happy to be deported. The problem in the US right now is the for profit concentration camps where they retain the "arrested" people without a clue of when they'll be able to leave. Read the article of the Canadian lady; but not her case, but the cases of the othrr people detained in the concentration camps.
Not sure if you read the whole article. But what REALLY scared me is not this women's experience, but the stories of the other people she met there:
>I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband. She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.
That, and a couple of other stories of people stuck there in the ICE concentration camps are crazy! I am scared right now because in a couple of months I have to travel to LA (on a tourist visa) for a connecting flight to Japan ... to think that I can be "disappeared" at immigration just because the immigration agent doesn't like me is chilling.
Make sure you have as much documentation as possible printed in triplicate.
Where you're staying, for how long, receipts and booking confirmation. Be very careful with any text messages that might sound "shady" to the very paranoid customs people.
Have an exact itinerary showing step by step where, when, who.
As someone outside the US who has worked with several of those companies before. The best one for the employees was Globalization Partners. Of course they were the most expensive.
Deel is the opposite: they provide US companies with gray area (or you could even say illegal in some countries) trickstery to reduce cost of employing people.
My wife has worked in manufacturing for 20 years. It's very interesting to hear all the "technologies" that they have developed: six sigma, Kanban, lean manufacturing and all that. A lot of of that really feels like REAL engineering. Vs "sprint review" and "retrospective" crap we deal with in software.
Lean applies to software probably more than any other methodology in my opinion.
The simple practice of aggressively removing waste in all of your processes offers more benefit than anything else. The result of that is often closer to a much more simplified kanban system in my experience as well.
The great thing about spreadsheets is that most grown ups understand them.
I've used it as the best UI for Accountants, Lawyers and other people that are famous for being afraid of technology. It's a great "bridge between "the system" and the people who want to get something from it.
If I were an accountant, I would be afraid of a lot of technology. In particular, if somebody offered me a Python code, and I didn’t know Python, I’d be quite worried about the handling of rounding and that sort of stuff, by some random programmer.
Excel was also written by some random programmer. But the code that does anything complicated was at least used by everybody in my field, so if there’s a hidden bug in there, at least the responsibility is diffuse. And the code written by me or by someone at my office… well, you can at least see what every cell does.
You speak to me as an insurance guy that also writes code to get things done. Excel is everywhere. So - everyone has the same lens/bug. Also, rounding/numbers in SQL
I’m not disputing spreadsheets as an assessable IDE for “non-programmers”.
I’m a big fan of spreadsheets for “getting shit done”.
But if you’re building a UI for other people to consume, you’ll quickly find that they’d break it in all manner of exotic ways.
This is why CRUD solutions exist. Sometimes you want the relational bookkeeping but with a more restricted UI. In those type of scenarios even MS Access is a better option than Excel (for example).
At first I thought it was some kind of UPS that would automatically "inject" AC to the house when it detected that there was no current in the mains (hence the connection to mains). But it seems it is just a glorified UPS... is that what the tesla "Wall" is?
A "no Electrician required" device that plugs into your wall and back-feeds power is a HUGE safety issue, and a HUGE no-no.
Half the problem with home-generation is a cutoff/sync device that synchronizes the frequency of your local generation with the grid, and kills power going back into the grid from your home generator when there is an outage, so line workers can do their jobs safely. And unless there is a more expensive/complicated device that can 'smear' the frequencys between the two systems slowly so they match after a disconnect/reconnect, most of these systems will shutdown local generation if there is no reference frequency from the main power feed.
Why is this a safety issue? Home batteries are capable of detecting outages and ensuring that they don’t back-feed after an outage. Pila is no different.
If you backfeed during an outage, and then the grid reconnects, you're fighting the grid. If you backfeed during an outage and an electrician is trying to fix lines near you, you can hurt them.
Why does the OP say it "disconnects in 20 ms of detecting an outage"? If it's a UPS, it doesn't need to disconnect - It's just no longer fed by the grid. If it's back-feeding, the point would be to _start_ the connection when you detect an outage. But backfeeding is an extremely bad idea.
I was commenting on the parent's mention of suspecting it could be a UPS that feeds power back into the house. It's one of those things that's super easy to DIY, or even do accidentally, but is super dangerous, so I didn't want anyone else thinking why not. I don't think you could even get a UL certification for such a device.
Right -- as long as it's just feeding power to the appliance, via a downstream outlet, like a UPS typically does. You can't send power back through the outlet the Pila is attached to, but you can send power to anything connected to it downstream.
I think it's a neat product, a UPS that doesn't look like a computer peripheral, that has large enough capacity to be useful for important appliances like fridges, that can be integrated into common spaces, and with some kind of management utility that can ensure the battery health is monitored.
You mean the Powerwall. It's more like a standby generator than a UPS, because they either backup the whole house, or a subpanel. There is an automatic transfer switch, just like a standby generator.
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The big differences between a Powerwall and a standby generator are:
The Powerwall needs no maintenance. (Standby generators need annual maintenance, oil changes, new spark plugs...)
The Powerwall needs no external fuel source. (No tank of diesel or propane, no need to have a natural gas service to the house.)
The Powerwall can be configured to only charge from solar. This allows owners to take advantage of renewable energy incentives.
The Powerwall can join Tesla's virtual power plant, and feed back into the grid, thus generating revenue. (Basically, charge from solar when demand for electricity is low, and feed back into the grid when demand for electricity is high.) Tesla paid me over $1000 for 2024.
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(In case you didn't know, a standby generator is the kind that automatically starts and powers your house in a blackout. A portable generator is, well, portable. If you have one, you have to manually start it, and either trip over extension cords, or wire in a manual transfer switch to your house.)
Exactly!! The prices are a result of extensive market research. Apple prices this things at a price they know people will buy it.
It's the beauty of having a product with no real competition in the market.
(BTW, I use Linux as my home and work OS But I'm a super geek and 20+ years full stack dev... not their target market, as I can handle the quirks and thousand papercuts of Linux)
Better yet, why not AMERICAN tax payers. I (non American) would be extremely happy for trump to pump BTC price so that I can sell my crypto at a 50x win. Thanks !
I have a theory that the volatility we have seen in crypto historically is due to the influence that speculators have in the price of the asset given the % of speculator vs non-speculator money sunk into BTC
As more and more "non-speculator" money enters BTC, the swings in the price will decrease. I see the "rainbow chart" as a backing to this theory. It shows how the price has been slowly settling . In 25 years we should have a very stable deflating BTC price.
But this is just more "speculator" money... if I'm being pessimistic, this is an outright scam play to make the early speculators filthy rich by defrauding the US public out of their tax dollars.
The whole freaking problem is that crypto turns out to suck absolute cock as a real method of paying for things (Said as someone who has actually paid for items with bitcoin, incl on the OG silk road...)
How many of these folks investing in bitcoin have EVER bought a physical item at a physical store with it? Hell, even online stores... how many of these people are actually using these things as currency, instead of as pure speculation plays?
The answer is a resounding "Almost no one".
They're a complete crap way to pay for anything that's not literally illegal to buy.
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And there is no utility to the coins unless you're either buying things with them, or speculating that you can exchange them for more of a usable currency at a later time. Period.
Expect to be using cryptocurrency a lot more than you're used to in the future. How does native integration with Windows and all major operating systems/phones sound?
The issues with the currency are NOT just "can I actually pay you with it" (and that's STILL a big issue) it's all the surrounding work around conflict resolution.
I paid a contractor with bitcoin, he didn't do the work, he won't refund me. Now fucking what?
Court orders him to to give it back? How? They have no mechanism they can apply on the blockchain to actually enforce that order...
At least they can physically seize cash... they can't even do that here.
We're back to the days of "Buried treasure" like it's fucking pirates gold. I don't actually think the majority of users have any interest in that reality.
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Based on your post history, I bet you think orange fuck boi's 1000 dollar bills are a great idea too. You probably have money in TRUMP coin... You seem like someone convinced they're brilliant but who will leak money like a sieve, and constantly be angry because you don't understand why.
> They have no mechanism they can apply on the blockchain to actually enforce that order...
How about legal authority, or prison? Even with cash, you aren't getting paid back because the court can walk into his home and grab the money. He pays you back because he doesn't want to go to jail or be found guilty.
>Based on your post history, I bet you think orange fuck boi's 1000 dollar bills are a great idea too. You probably have money in TRUMP coin... You seem like someone convinced they're brilliant but who will leak money like a sieve, and constantly be angry because you don't understand why.
Come on now... we can agree and disagree and bring our arguments forward. But this is unnecessary, it doesn't promote insightful conversation. Your other arguments were very good. Don't pollute them with this.
Exactly. People forget that btc is still in price discovery. A brand new global monetary standard isn't priced by edict, the market must figure it out. Of course it's volatile, if it were smooth/predictable then this predictability would be exploited by traders and it would cease being predictable.
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