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I'm an industrial electrician. I'm also skinny; people often undrestimate me. Once I had two non-electrician coworkers helping me pull some large wire and make up splices in a trough. One beefy guy was struggling with the wire, so I grabbed it, twisted it around into place. The other guy says, surprised, "You're stronger than you look." I just said, "Sure".

Because of the way the strands are laid, wire has a direction and way it "wants" to go. I'd been an electrician twenty years by that point and knew how to work it. Not strength. Not that I said any of that.


I think some call that “old man strength”.

Might not be as strong or fast as he used to be, but knows how to do it smartly.

Sometimes the problem truly requires strength and brute force, but not usually.

Even something like taking up concrete. It seems straight forward but you can waste a lot of energy hitting the wrong places.


> Might not be as strong or fast [..] knows how to do it smartly.

Friend of mine worked in Prisons for a while, and has a way of telling the difference between people with a lot of muscle and people who know how leverage their musculature to high effect.


Also using all your motor units to their full capacity (the "invisible" strength) helps. Which usually requires at least some training.

I think it might be like "mechanics feel" they talked about directly in the book zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

You get enough experience and you can turn a bolt or screw and tighten it to stretch a little.

Not too little (doesn't hold parts together and/or can come loose).

Not too much (uneven tightening or snap/strip something).

Just right (torque wrenches make this precise).


When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.


Yeah, I'm just barely old enough to remember flying when you could smoke on planes.

It was everywhere. The smell of stale cigarette smoke was in nearly every public space. This was in the 80s in the US, so smoking was already in decline, but the smell was still this constant background presence.


I remember flying in the 80s (and early nineties in parts of Europe) and always got 'air-sick' which made flying awful. Only after smoking was banned did I realise I wasn't motion sickness but it was instead poisoning from the smokers around me. My parents would book non-smoking seats and we'd be 1 row in front of the smokers...wild times


I remember a discussion whether it was rude to lit a cigarette at the dinner table before everyone had finished their meal or not.


I remember this. Ashtrays were practically part of the furniture (especially coffee tables), even if you didn't have a smoker at home.


Elementary school children would make ashtrays as gifts for Father's Day.

If dad didn't smoke, surely he had guests who did.


Yeah. I remember that too. It was such an odd thing to make at schools and kids clubs. But that’s through the lens of modern life.


I vaguely remember living room chairs with built in ash trays (like how some have cup holders now).

And in the late 90s, being on a plane and the chairs had a metal folding door on the armrest that exposed an ash tray. Smoking on planes was already gone or going away, but the hardware lingered for quite some time.


Think these bins persisted on some aircraft until fairly recently. Maybe 10 yrs ago?


Ha my first ceramic project in elementary school art class was an ashtray. Smoking was everywhere.


As was passing out cigarettes and cigars to all the guests, didn't see this so much in the USA but very common in Europe even into the late 1990s.


So true. My parents would bring out ashtrays when we had guests.


It makes you wonder how accurate the smoking cancer stats are. IF everyone smoked, presumably this means a lot of people who are not recorded in the stats despite smoking or former smokers, lowering the mortality rate or risk factor, although obvious smoking is still bad.


I would expect it to be the other way around.

If nearly everyone smoked, then even nonsmokers were constantly getting a fair amount of secondhand smoke.

This would raise the background rate of cancer, making it appear that smoking raises your risk by less than it actually does.


Non smokers did get lung cancer [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Castle#Illness_and_death


Yes, exactly my point.

If the "normal" rate of lung cancer is X, the observed rate in nonsmokers who get secondhand smoke is X+Y, and the observed rate in smokers is X+Y+Z, if you compare nonsmokers and smokers it looks like smoking increases your rate by Z when it's actually Y+Z.


this agrees with my point because non-smoker are being counted in cancer risk. we're only interested in people who choose to smoke. public smoking bans make secondhand smoke less risky/relevant as a factor. we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.


> we're only interested in the risk , independent of secondhand smoke, of someone choosing to smoke getting cancer.

No, that's where you're wrong.

You are only interested in that independent risk.

I, and many others, are interested in how much smoking changes that risk.

Picking random numbers, let's say smoking gives you a 10% chance of lung cancer. It's fine for you to only care about that 10% number, you get to care about what you want to.

But for the rest of us, when making informed decisions based on risk, it matters whether smoking changes it from 9.9% to 10%, or 0.1% to 10%.


About 1/2 of all people who ever died from smoking-related causes were non-smokers.


Cite?

So it's about $630 USD and sold out.

"Limited to 650 units worldwide (production units)."


I have a hardhat, high viz vest, lanyard, and $600 toolbelt because I'm an industrial electrician, but they get me into a lot. My face becomes invisible; I become "The Electrician".


A while ago I read about Todd Lappin making his personal car look like a work truck as an urban camouflage project.

> This urban camouflage guise is very useful for parking in yellow zones, urban/industrial exploration, and crime deterrence. And the thing is… it really works!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/telstar/1665853

https://kk.org/cooltools/urban-camouflag/


The free coffee is a nice bonus.


The professionals actually use a tool that looks about like a big (BIG) vibrator, along with various other vibrating tools.


The usual arrangement for an LBO is to saddle the bought company, the vet in this example, with the debt,or spin off a secondary company from the vet with the poorest assets and most to all of the debt. It's all a scummy business.


Then why is everyone complaining "my vet sucks now" and not "my vet went out of business"?


Because the vet does suck now, and yet is still profitable because there's not enough competition.


We have red light cameras here in Tampa. I don't know all the details of what it takes to make a right on red and not get a ticket, so I do exaggerated stops to be sure. I know what the law claims but that doesn't matter. The real law is the actual (proprietary) code rumning in the machine. Not what the law says. Not what the contract says. Not what the requirements say. Not what the programmer thinks the code does.


No, the real law is what's written by the Tampa/Florida legislature (or I guess you could say the "real real" law is judges' interpretations of what is written). While it may be inconvenient, if you are falsely issued a ticket while following the real law you can have the ticket thrown out.


What kind of time and money and opportunity cost would it take to right this wrong?


I don't know for sure because I don't live in Tampa, but it is generally free (minus the opportunity cost of your time) for these types of tickets, no lawyer or other expense required.


This is the correct take. And it's frustrating! To fix the problem an individual has to fight a huge, multi-party system (law, jurisdiction, police, tech-provider) - it's a (near) impossible feat for a person.


Sorry, but what is the concern, that you don't know when you've crossed a red light? Or that the software is too stupid to know when a light was red?


In some parts of the U.S.A. it's legal to turn right through a red light. GP was wondering if the software can tell that the driver was making a legal right turn through the red instead of doing the thing that's obviously illegal everywhere because it's just a matter of time until you kill someone.


While I don't agree about population either way, in my lifetime it's grown from about 3 billion to over 8 billion. This has been quite a ride. Also, there's a world of a difference between global carrying capacity with responsible aliens managing, and our current management.


This is the answer to most of professional life. Unionize! If you don't manage people, join a union. If you think where you work is fine so you don't need a union, that's when you need one, before something like this happens.


I manage people and am in a Union. I still have a boss, and in a dispute I was able to call on their help


I could make a good case for the United States fitting that description, especially the bits about trade and agression.


The US is complex antihero type.

While it definitely attacks threats and has perpetrated plenty of unjust deeds, it also is responsible for the food security of much of the world. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any other party. It has brought poor nations to the point of industrialization.

The US has been a far greater force for good in the world than evil.

The leadership changes frequently, so it's hard to point to any single responsible party. It's democratic, so its institutions are subject to scrutiny. The free press sheds light on corruption and rule breaking.

Despite changing immigration narratives, the US has been an early and strong proponent of multiculturalism and welcoming people.

With declining US hegemony, the world is likely to become a much more dangerous place. We'll see more economic strife, more war, higher costs, greater tensions.


but at least we will have alternative energy sources in Solar, wind, batteries and probably a Nuclear renaissance which might reduce the incentives on fight for Oil & Gas even if the fights move to other resources


> fights move to other resources

Food (eg. protein, fisheries, etc.), water (eg. dams), materials (eg. rare earths), land, strategic geography, trade, labor, security, political upheaval, power struggles, sectarian violence, terrorism, religion, historical claims, climate, etc. etc. etc.

Under a single global order, disagreements were normally put aside to participate in global trade. As we begin to move to distributed trading blocs and factions, many of these disagreements will boil over. Parties won't step up to stop them.


China is doing really well in solar. Both domestically and globally, because they are providing cheap solar panels to the rest of the world. (Well, apart from those idiots with tariffs to 'protect' them from green energy.)


No, you could make a weak case for the US doing that by using vague definitions and a lot of handwaving.

The Chinese government does this a lot.


The number of black Americans in prison over weed for decades is not a weak case.


Putting people in prison for weed, something China does as well, is not the same as imprisoning people for blog posts (something China does the US doesn't).


The US is sending off-colored people who say wrong things online without the right paperwork to camps.

really doesn't seem to be as stark a difference as there once was.


The inevitable whataboutism.

Firstly it's not relevant to a discussion about China's behavior.

Yes the US under Trump has become increasingly authoritarian, but besides being not as oppressive as China, the US remains a democracy and there is a chance to vote bad people out of the White House and more importantly reverse the direction of the country.


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