No because that would require some form of energy transfer. To observe the state of the system you have to take energy from it. I suspect your very presence would likely be a big contributor to this not working to start with too.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist; merely an engineer.
Paypal offers one extra thing over the top, which is the ability to easily get your money back if the seller screws up.
I use this a lot with sellers in the UK. If you ask them directly for a refund because they forget something or sent you crap (dominos are good at this), it is like getting blood out of a stone. Even being polite, some people will just jam the phone down and tell you to fuck off.
If you pay with paypal, they usually don't even respond and the money just gets returned after 2 weeks by default with paypal. If they do respond they usually just refund a portion anyway.
So what you're getting on top is arbitration.
If you use your credit card, you're pretty screwed here in the UK unless the amount is over £100.
Those are likely pretty trivial boards which you place parts yourself. I do that at home with crap equipment. It's not quite as easy if you have to have someone to place parts for you, which is required without significant investment if you are placing BGA / 0201 / 0402 packages reliably etc.
I’d like to see that but I think the turnaround and unpredictability of third parties adds a lot of risk to a product development cycle. If you look at lead times for PCBs and population for example it can be a 30 day turnaround minimum for every cock up you make on a prototype. During that time your engineers may be dead in the water. To get around that you can pay a 20x premium to have your boards shipped fast. Two iterations will pay for a pick and place machine and a basic PCB fab environment and fill the boards yourself. You should already have the rework tools in house. Same with plastics where a 3d printer will get you close enough to get the production tooling done.
The big issue is really setting up manufacturing and supply chain on a large scale when you do get it working.
Ignoring the obvious welfare complaint, which I incidentally agree with, it paints a pretty good picture of all the health and social problems leading up to this situation for a lot of people. It also shows how the health of the previous generation can cause havoc on the current generation, a problem which I'm dealing with now.
If we improve physical and mental health over the next couple of generations I think there will be a massive shift away from this failure mode. The problem is that those services are being cut as is the education that supports them. So we're screwed.
Also a 4 year cycle on government before someone comes and erases progress or long term goals instantly and just burns a mountain of cash doesn't work either.
Indeed. When A is shit and B is shit then the result of your A/B testing is going to be the least shit of the two. At the end of the day it's going to be shit either way.
I'm a firm believer that you should never ask your user to make a decision or look over their shoulder. Not once ever. You should listen to their complaints and ideas when they come to you, then build your strategy on that. Be reactive, not prescriptive. That empowers the user, shows respect and results in a satisfactory product that benefits the user which after all is the end game.
Telemetry invades the user's privacy. Feedback does not empower the user because the user expects a reaction from it which is unlikely. A/B testing results in churn for the user which does not show respect, merely that they are a test subject.
Microsoft as a fine example could learn a lot from listening to their users rather than steamroll ahead based on collected telemetry and feedback data.
A fine example: People didn't want UWP/metro and still don't today. I have yet to meet one person who uses that side of windows 10. They wanted shit that worked, was faster and kept out of their way and didn't wreck the workflow that they had invested years in learning or had someone experienced close at hand to help them with it. 90% of the userbase just installs chrome and does everything in there as well so that stuff just gets in the way.
We’re on a solar cycle minima at the moment which slightly ruins ionospheric propagation on HF which is the least “line of sight” set of bands. However it’s on the up again so in a year or so expect 1000km regularly.
I regularly hear East European stations here in London, UK with a random length bit of wire strung off a home made 40m receiver and into a tree though. Noise here is terrible so I have had to use very heavy narrow bandwidth audio and IF filtering.
If you want long distance, be prepared to use very narrow bandwidth i.e. learn CW though (its not that hard although I have trouble copying some of the faster stations).
Have a look at amateur radio and satellite operations as a whole. You can, with some persistence and brains have a chat with someone a vast distance away via satellite repeater with nothing but a cheap handheld radio.
I’ve only managed to receive so far due to a cruddy antenna but that was with a $30 Baofeng radio from Amazon.
Note: you need a license but it’s pretty easy to get, at least in the UK and you learn a lot while getting it. It also tends to cost you a lot of money in the end because it’s really interesting :)
I did this as well for a bit. You get to the point when carrots, tomatoes and potatoes taste incredibly sweet and broccoli, if not murdered, tastes marvellous. I ended up growing a load of things.
Where I live in the UK we just put the clothes in a bag next to the recycling containers and they get taken away.
They also take away car batteries, car oil, small appliances, batteries etc
In an effort to not have to go to the dump with them, as I didn’t have a car at the time, I actually chopped up two entire sofas with an axe and a knife and recycled them over the space of three months too :)