20 years ago it was the people who worshipped Jack Welch, not realizing (or not caring) that he was running GE into the ground.

localizing and streamlining production

These are two distinct goals, sometimes that work against each other. Localization is often a tradeoff between saving energy on transport and logistics versus economies of scale in production, and the right balance might look different for different things.

The carbon footprint of a banana shipped across the globe is still far less than that of the typical backyard chicken, because the act of raising a chicken at home is so inefficient (including with commercially purchased feed driven home in a passenger car) that it can’t compete on energy/carbon footprint.

There are products where going local saves energy, but that’s not by any means a universal correlation.

I don’t see rental bikes on a daily rate as a primary mode of transportation. Plenty of people only come into the city on certain days, or visit cities they don’t live in, or otherwise just need to get around a single place they would’ve walked. They need the ability to start and stop in arbitrary places, and not bring something with them.

It feels so real in how disappointing the experience becomes for the straight characters.

This hits the nail on the head. It’s funny because of the point of view of the actual participants.

The funny thing about this thread is that there are so many comments essentially agreeing with the central premise of the sketch, that it’s relatable and disorienting when you stumble onto some kind of established fandom and can’t seem to keep up with why it’s popular or what is or isn’t “part of it.” The popularity is confusing in itself, and the need to dissect the lore (as OP is doing, perhaps even unintentionally following the sketch itself) distracts from the original purpose of going there to be entertained.

In other words, the sketch is funny and relatable exactly for the same reasons why much of the audience doesn’t find it funny and relatable.

if it’s immediately rewarding

Hell of a caveat there.

Anywhere strangers tend to be around each other long enough to where small talk might be a welcome distraction: waiting in lines for something, sitting at a community table or bar/counter with mixed groups (especially while waiting for the rest of your respective friend groups to show up), sitting next to each other at a public event like live sports or a concert with downtime, volunteer events where you might be set up next to strangers doing the same thing, etc.

It’s easier when there’s a natural end to the interaction (your turn in line, the start of the sporting event), too.

Smartphones and headphones have made it harder, but there are still opportunities when people are bored and sitting around.

I think you’re right. The line blurring between corporate sponsorship and community support is pretty difficult to determine. If someone wants to build a community around a particular video game or movie or television show, of course the corporation that publishes it benefits from a bunch of positive discussion about it. But at the same time, that corporate-owned product is part of our shared culture, and a legitimate topic to discuss in a forum like this.

And it’s not even necessarily pure corporate stuff, either. There are nonprofit and trade and governmental organizations that rely on advertising for public messaging: a tourism board promoting their location as a good vacation spot, an agricultural trade group promoting recipes using their specific product, a government health department drive encouraging vaccinations, etc. They pay for ads through conventional outlets while also promoting their interests on social media.

It’s just an ecosystem. We should be aware that there are those who would seek to influence us here, whether for money or politics or other motivation, and navigate these spaces with that in mind.

I get how it works with wifi connections, and Bluetooth scanning (since that’s a peer to peer protocol that needs to broadcast its availability), and obviously the OS-level location services, but I’m still not seeing how seeing wifi beacons would reveal anything. For one, pretty much every mobile device OS now uses MAC randomization so that your wifi activity on one network can’t be correlated with another. And for another, I think the BSSID scanning protocol is listen only for client devices.

Happy to be proven wrong, and to learn more, but the article linked doesn’t seem to explain anything on this particular supposed threat.

I set a simple task to turn off WiFi when my home network is not detected so my phone doesn’t scan and report my location to businesses.

I was under the impression that BSSID scanning was entirely passive, and that a phone that scans for beacons doesn’t actually reveal itself to anyone.

Thankfully Russians already developed a cocktail that incorporates all these techniques.

The Molotov cocktail was first used by the Finns against the Soviets, and were named after the enemy, not the user.

One time pads are perfect encryption, but the problem is that the key length needs to be longer than the message length. So if you have the ability to get the symmetric key to the recipient securely, then you had the ability to get the whole message to the recipient securely.

And that introduces a specific type of supply chain threat: someone who possesses a computer can infect their own computer, sell it or transfer it to the target, and then use the embedded microcode against the target, even if the target completely reformats and reinstalls a new OS from scratch.

That’s not going to affect most people, but for certain types of high value targets they now need to make sure that the hardware they buy hasn’t already been infected in the supply chain.

pronounced “Kam”

C’mon we all know the first syllable of “chameleon” is pronounced “cum”

In the US, because the minimum required by law is so low, the actual distribution of vacation days varies a lot from employer to employer.

This chart, updated annually, shows the average by length of service time: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employee-benefits/paid-leave-sick-vacation-days-by-service-requirement.htm

Seems like the average for people in the private sector with 1 year is 7 days sick, 11 days vacation.

This fact sheet, as of 2021, breaks down the details a bit more: https://www.bls.gov/ebs/factsheets/paid-vacations.htm

Table 1 breaks it down pretty well, with people at the 1 year mark hovering mostly between 1-3 weeks, people at the 5 year mark mostly between 2-4 weeks, and people with 10 years at 3+ weeks.

People with government jobs, which is about 15% of the workforce and about 20 million workers, tend to get better benefits, including paid time off.

The TZ database doesn’t tell us what the offsets will be in the future. Only the past.

I think the comment is specifically talking about storing future times, and contemplating future changes to the local time zone offsets.

If I say that something is going to happen at noon local time on July 1, 2030 in New York, we know that is, under current rules, going to happen at 16:00 UTC. But what if the US changes its daylight savings rules between now and 2030? The canonical time for that event is noon local time, and the offset between local time and UTC can only certainly be determined with past events, so future events defined by local will necessarily have some uncertainty when it comes to UTC.

This meme format works best to absurdly overstate the uselessness of something you find mildly annoying. That’s when it’s funniest, because the criticisms are grounded in something real, and the low-stakes controversy makes the aggressive tone funny in context.

Oh don’t worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.

I’ve seen it for keypads that have to send a signal to an actuator located elsewhere, but I think the typical in-door deadbolt (where the keypad is mere millimeters from the motor itself) wouldn’t have the form factor leaving the connection as exposed to a magnet inducing a current that would actually actuate the motor.

Most of LPL’s videos on smart locks just defeat the mechanical backup cylinder, anyway. I’d love to see him take on the specific Yale x Nest model I have, though.

Yup. The backup for battery failure on this model is that the bottom of the plate can accept power from the pins of a 9V battery, held there just long enough to punch in the code.