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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • It’s not worth the effort and testing. People would only experience it once every 3-4 years, depending on when they get a new laptop. Must still shouldn’t have to worry since other software would install that version of .NET already.

    Plus, people don’t bother to read error messages anyways. Another tool I created would create PDFs of the financials. The first section would be pulled from the EPM and the second would be a data dump of every transaction for each cost center. If the totals don’t match to the dollar, the script would throw an error.

    90% of the time, it was because the EPM data was being refreshed as it’s scheduled to do so every half hour and takes 3-4 minutes. So I had the error message tell the person to just go take a quick break and come back. Still, people would email me saying they don’t understand why they’re getting the error and it would always be fixed if they just wait.


  • I don’t even work in IT but I make complex Excel tools for my Finance team.

    I get an email about once every week or two from one of my coworkers asking what to do about an issue. Nearly every single issue would have been resolved if they just read even the first few instructions.

    My favorite is a specific tool we use to review the financials. It relies on Scripting.Dictionary which is only present in .NET 3.5.1 or prior. The very first instruction on the file says you need to download it. There’s even a very handy button right there which will take you to our software center to install it.

    Yet every single time someone gets a new laptop, they immediately assume that the file is broken.




  • That’s the only reason I bought a modern car.

    My parents would always buy cheap beaters. They had a car from the 90s they only recently got rid of because the transmission was shot. My first car was an '05 Caravan I drove for almost two years and got rid of in 2018.

    I swallowed the pill after seeing cars get absolutely crushed to the point where the jaws of life were necessary yet passengers could just walk out.

    I remember someone posted a picture of their brand new sedan. It was involved in a serious accident and sandwiched between two large pickup trucks. The entire car was squished down until it was smaller than the passenger compartment. The driver was able to walk away with minor injuries and the paramedics weren’t even surprised.

    I don’t give a shit about the fancy features. I just want something that is reliable and safe.


  • Fwiw mining and manufacturing isn’t as bad as some people want you to believe.

    About 40% of lithium comes from brine extraction. There’s a lot of lithium in the ground which are dissolved in brine - a super salty solution of minerals and water. They’re extracted by allowing the water to evaporate into the atmosphere and then retrieving the minerals from that.

    While that “wastes” a lot of water, none of that water was usable in the first place. It’s too salty for humans and would kill any plants or fish if used for crops or dumped respectively.

    Another 60% comes from normal hard rock mining. This is as environmentally friendly as most mining is.

    A small portion - about 2% - comes from clay mining. This is actually rather bad for the environment and results in a lot of atmospheric pollution. Fortunately, it’s a small shrinking portion of total mining.

    The other main minerals in li-ions are cobalt, manganese, and lithium.

    A large amount of cobalt comes from artisanal mining in the Congo. Artisanal is just a fancy term that means it’s not work being performed by a company at a dedicated mine, but on a small scale such as a single person digging an area and collecting it or a handful of people who run their own mine. Unfortunately, though, we know that slave and child labor are used at a large portion of these mines.

    Fortunately, there has been a large push to move to more sustainable mining practices. Some Congo miners have allowed outside observers to verify that all miners are adults working of their own volition.

    Other countries such as Cuba and Indonesia have begun mining cobalt and are also following minimum employment practices. As a side benefit, these mines are also the main sources for nickel which reduces the number of mines we need.

    Manganese is rather interesting. The current extraction process involves using natural gas to separate the components. However, there are nodules on the ocean floor which are rich in manganese. While these would produce less pollution to process, there are worries that removing the nodules would cause irreparable harm to the local environment.

    However, even if your batteries were mined in the most harmful method possible and your power comes from the dirtiest plant of all time, the long term emissions are still much better than driving the most fuel-efficient ICE over the same time period.


  • And while it’s a more minor issue, EVs are heavier than ICE vehicles in the same class, which causes more road wear and more tire wear (and more micro plastics to enter the environment).

    Easy solution is to move to Indiana. Our environment means that almost every day from November through April, the temperatures will be in the 30s-50s in the day and 10-20 at night, so the pavement is constantly cracking. Combine that with the lack of investment in infrastructure (Indy literally has a ban on new streetlights and stop lights going back to the 80s) and it doesn’t matter how heavy the car is, the pavement will be just as broken.







  • OpnSense would be the easiest way if you wanted to go. It’s still not easy, but the articles online should help you out.

    First you’d need a machine. I’ve got an m920q I bought off eBay for $135 after shipping.

    The computer will likely only have one Ethernet port. And it’s likely the port is Realtek which isn’t supported well.

    So, you’ll need to get yourself a NIC (a fancy term for a network card). There are good forum posts and articles online about the best NICs to buy for your needs. Intel is a must. However, you can find many of their NICs online labeled as another brand - usually HP, Lenovo, or Dell. Again, the forum posts will tell you what to look for.

    If you bought the same computer I mentioned above, you’ll also need a riser and a bezel. Amazon and eBay will have a good selection.

    Now assemble it. Flash the computer with OpnSense. Don’t plug it in as your router yet. Follow along with some basic setup guides online to figure out how you want it configured.

    Once you’re happy, plug it in as your router and test that it works. If not, you’ll need to put your old router back in place until you can figure out what you need to change.



  • SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do.

    That’s how nearly all modern devices work. Li-Ion can’t be charged and discharged simultaneously. There is circuitry to split the power between the battery and the device when it’s being charged.

    Cheaper devices will just stop charging when you use them or they won’t work at all when plugged in.




  • Only way I’m using most shopping sites is if I know they’re trustworthy and if they support PayPal or one of the major payment processors. I’m not going to type my CC number into a random website and trust that they aren’t hacked.

    There are a lot of issues with PayPal, but at least it makes it easy for me to get a refund if the seller refuses. The last time I had to get a refund, it was because the seller told me I had to ship my $20 product back to China in order to get a 50% refund. This was despite the returns agreement explicitly requiring them to cover return shipping and that shipping it to China would have cost me about $150.


  • droans@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world*deleted by creator*
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    9 months ago

    The details for Prime explicitly refer to it as Two Day Delivery, not shipping.

    Prime Membership Benefits

    Delivery benefits

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  • droans@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlMust win
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    9 months ago

    They haven’t had an expansion franchise since 2002 and it’s unlikely it’ll happen any time in the near future. 32 teams is perfectly balanced - each conference has 16 teams and four divisions. Each division has four teams.

    It would also be very expensive.

    You’d need a stadium that met the NFL standards. The average stadium costs about $2B. Fortunately for her (and unfortunately for the rest of us), taxpayers on average pay about $1.2B of that. We’ll be very generous and assume they paid even more or she received a substantial loan that will be paid off otherwise, leaving her with about $250M out of pocket.

    It should be noted that the opposite is more often true for expansion teams, though. Cities don’t want to pay for the stadium because there’s more risk with new teams. They could decide to leave very quickly, the owners might not have the capital to keep the team afloat, etc. The Texans were the last expansion team and nearly all of the cost for their stadium was privately funded.

    Now, the NFL also charges a fee for expansion teams. This mostly has to be a guesstimate because we haven’t seen one in two decades. The Texans paid $700M at the time so we can assume it would be closer to $1.5B now.

    After that, you have the practice facilities and offices. Cities don’t usually cover that. You might be able to get away with using local facilities for a couple of years, but that won’t be enough to actually create a competitive team. A safe low-end estimate for this would be $150M. The Cowboys paid $1.5B for their facilities, but other teams have paid as low as $125M.

    Finally, the last big cost is payroll. This by itself would sink any chance she has.

    The NFL requires all guaranteed contracted salaries to be placed in escrow. I’m not sure where that rule came from, but I can probably guess Al Davis is to blame. A single year’s salary would be $225M for 2023 and around $240M for next season.

    However, most of the big name players have guarantees that would destroy that. The most common is a signing bonus. Teams love them because the salary cap rules would allow them to amortize it over the length of the contract, including “void years”. Your QB would receive about $200M immediately upon signing. The expansion draft picks and early draft picks would be another $300-500M likely. In the end, the salary escrow plus bonuses would be about $500M-1B.

    So assuming everything goes her way, she’d be on the hook for close to $2.5B immediately plus the reoccurring costs.

    It should also be noted that the NFL isn’t really a great way to make money as an owner. It’s really just a long term retirement hobby for billionaires. They could just go invest in companies or whatever, but they buy NFL teams because they like football and it occupies their time. Yeah, they’ll make money, but not as much as they otherwise could. There’s a reason most owners hate the idea of a super-billionaire like Bezos owning a team.