My partner 10+ years ago used to be very OCD about Asbestos when we had toddlers, and said that she would see tiny white fibers of it in the bark chips at a bunch of parks that the kids were playing at.
Turns out she was correct, its since been found in loads of mulch around Sydney.
We also came across a huge pile of it illegally dumped a bunch of years ago in the sand dunes at Kurnell beach, kids were happily playing in it.
I've got an LG Gram 17-inch laptop that weighs about the same as a 13-inch macbook air.
Having a huge screen on a super-light, super skinny laptop is so handy for portability and all the extra screen real-estate is great for a developer. Its difficult to go back to a 14-inch.
I wish more laptop manufacturers would make ultra-lights with large screens.
You used to walk into a newsagent and see the regular papers and magazines, and then the rack of playboy and porn just sitting off to the side, often not that far from the kids magazines and comics.
I was effectively uninsured as a foreigner, and had to pay for it myself hoping that I'd be reimbursed by my company later.
I had a nasty ear-infection, could hardly walk, and was in no state to argue, but the nurse gave me dozens of what they said were completely "normal procedure" blood tests from their in-house lab, which the doctor would have profited from directly. I told them I was leaving the next day and wouldn't get any results if they took a day, but they ignored and persisted.
I looked at the bill later and they were for loads and loads of completely unrelated conditions, diabetes, HIV, etc... a useless waste.
It was price gouging from the doctor directly pure and simple, no insurance providers involved, but I'm sure that normally that also adds an extra layer of silly costs.
In Australia its carefully regulated what a doctor can charge, and its a different company that does any tests, or gives out medication, the doctor or company can't profit directly from sending patients off for more testing, or for prescribing medication.
Australians are more litigious than Americans, with similar insurance costs for doctors, yet our healthcare costs are still half of the USA's.
So insurance costs may be a factor, but its doubtful that its a large factor in healthcare costs, they largest factor is by far the public vs private system.
I experienced US healthcare when I went to visit a doctor in the US for a simple (obvious) ear infection. I was charged $600 USD for a five minute consult because the doctor wanted to milk as much $$$ from me as he could, giving me lots of unrelated/pointless blood tests (which were pointless because I was flying out the next day and wouldn't get the results).
In Australia it would have been a $65 fee paid by the government, and $10 for the antibiotics, around 1/10th of the US costs.
The problem in the US is that doctors and hospitals are incentivised to give patients unnecessary tests and medication, because it inflates their bills, and they make more profit.
I've noticed the same thing happening in Australia with private vets & vet hospitals because they are less regulated. They try and talk you into a lot of unnecessary procedures, test, and drugs because they make more profit, and the industry is not where near as well regulated as healthcare.
At least with a vet you can usually shop around, when you are sick often you cannot.
I find that LLMs are almost comically bad at projects that have a hardware component like RaspberryPi or Pico, or Ardunio.
I think that its because often the libraries you use are niche or have a a few similar versions, the LLM really commonly hallucinated solutions and would continually suggest that library X did have that capability. I think because often in hardware projects you often hit a point where you can't do something or you need to modify a library, but the LLM tries to be "helpful" and it makes up a solution.
We can't have true competition with utilities, because we'd need six sets of pipes into every apartment just to have six competing providers, so the government needs to step in and regulate utilities, because they are a natural monopoly.
The change is a good one, and there's still abilities that differentiate species, so dwarves still have toughness, and a bunch of other abilities.
Previously a Dwarven wizard was just a really bad choice, and you'd be noticeably less powerful than say an Elven wizard so no-one ever played one.
Now an Elven Wizard for instance has a few bits and pieces that might make them a bit better, but still leave a Dwarven Wizard as a viable choice.
This makes the game far more interesting in every way: players have more interesting builds, more character choices, and can play whatever combinations that they want.
My brother (Australian) spent some time in Canada and was able to see a doctor straight away and really cheaply a bunch of times, and visited the hospital once with a nasty foot injury with no dramas. It seemed like a pretty good system.
I remember contrasting that with my US experience at the same time, where a 10 minute consult with a doctor cost 600USD. I had a really obvious ear infection, just needed some antibiotics, but he must have seen me as a cash-cow and ordered a ton of unrelated blood tests that were pointless since I was flying out the next day. I walked away feeling like I'd been scammed.
(In Australia a doctor's visit is under 30USD, blood tests don't cost much either)
No I think that there's more to it than superstition - We often blame things on superstition when we don't understand them ourselves.
I've been playing around with sleeping with a fan & air-conditioning and I always notice that my throat is all dryed out in the morning from the air flow directly over my face.
I need a couple of glasses of water to re-hydrate after sleeping with a fan or air-conditioner, so if its not too warm a night I prefer to leave them off. I seem to get a better night's sleep too, but maybe that's just because it's a cooler night.
There's many companies that have reproduced the tictok algorithm. Surely if it was sold, the multibillion dollar company would have no issue with that aspect.
I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like an abuse of monopoly power (Antitrust laws)
Google sounds like they are using their control of the Android store to prevent an application being published that competes with their Google Maps Mobile App, which also offers similar public transport tracking and time-table information
Certificates prove that a website/server (and sometimes the client) are who they say they are.
We force the website to renew their certificate from an issuer every year so that stolen tokens/certificates are less of a problem.
The issuer can protect or hide the identity of the certificate owner, and doesn't get any information about which clients accessed a server.