FWIW, here is the US, the ground wire is often completely exposed. As in, no colored jacket, just the bare copper throughout the entire run. Attached to ground at the breaker box, and attached to any grounding ports or metal boxes throughout the building.

Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.

Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of

How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?

Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.

I’ve never used it, but Crossover Office was developed largely to get MS Office working on Linux. It looks like it’s still maintained.

It’s at least worth looking into.

Timing and pacing are inherently different when there’s a laugh track. You can’t just silence the laughter or cut the time range. In some cases, you have to rework the joke.

The audience usually attends for free (“for free tickets to the _____ show, call…”), but there’s still a lot of overhead. Not only do you need ushers, security, and so on, you need to be filming on a sound stage with a place for the audience.

On the flip side, laugh tracks are easily added in post.

Counterpoint: birthdays (and cake days, and many anniversaries) are a pointless celebration.

Payton Oswalt had a pretty good plan on that: https://youtu.be/sbJs-Ul1QFo

To add to this, imagine the reverse. Can you imagine if they passed up better opportunities, just so that it could happen on a specific date on the calendar?

Sounds absurd, right?

I think you’re approaching the wrong aspect. While that could be a scam where a man is impersonating a woman, there are plenty where it’s actually a woman running the scam. There are plenty of red flags here, and those don’t change.

The problem is that I’m sure your friend is aware of those red flags. He’s also choosing to ignore them. I suspect he doesn’t do well with women IRL, and this at least gives him hope.

Assuming that’s all true, this is way above the pay grade of random people on the Internet.

Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It’s clearly not an experience that people flock to.

OTOH, on the rare occasion I’ve visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.

As long as it’s advertised openly, I don’t see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It’s a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.

Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn’t particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.

Economies of scale affects the costs to the manufacturer. Competition/demand affect the price to the consumer.

To extend this, consider your own safety throughout. Unless the police arrest them and they remain in custody, you have a potential serious threat. Avoid situations where you/others could be vulnerable, such as alone or at night. You may want to setup visible surveillance cameras, alter your routines, etc.

The police will be there after anything happens, but that may be too late for you.

There was a time, a few decades ago, when there was a real demand to get away from the negativity of most campaigns. Everyone says they wanted it, polls clearly showed it, etc.

But then there was another study which analyzed the effectiveness of campaigns (i.e. if they won) vs how negative they went.

Negativity was clearly proven to be the winning tactic.

Ignoring how meaningless the statement is in the first place, obligatory XKCD.

https://xkcd.com/1122/

“Hackers” (rather, malicious actors) rarely look to take down IT resources as their goal. Instead, they want to access it for their own purposes. The closest example would be ransomware, where it gets taken down as part of the threat/punishment. But if the victim pays, their resources must be restored.

Plus, I would be surprised if Crowd Strike doesn’t have any protections on its own files. I also expect there will be additional verification checks (hash/etc) on their updates going forward.

Who do you think runs those servers? What do you think those companies run on their Linux servers?

There’s an interesting theory that Hitler was put in place by time travelers as the last-bad option that wouldn’t destroy the timeline.

Hitler (and Trump) made a number of blundering errors that any idiot should’ve/known better than to make. Had a competent, or even a supervillain-type been in charge, things could’ve turned out even worse than they did. You don’t have to look far- some of these villains attach themselves to those in power. Himmler and Heydrich would’ve been far worse for the world, but were somewhat limited by not being the ones directly in power.

This does exist on certain vehicles, like ambulances.

But I’ve heard (unconfirmed) that it would be illegal in several states to put on passenger vehicles.

This isn’t true, at least in the US. The vast majority of dog food is safe for human consumption, albeit not recommended.