I replace my tyres once per year because I average around 25-30 thousand kms per year. They tend to last 10-50 thousand kms depending on usage, but knowing I will be putting the car in for replacing them again a few months later it seems worth just getting done. It makes it simpler and the cost of repairing or replacing my car plus the opportunity cost of not having a working car makes it cheaper to just accept the known cost of replacing the tyres rather than the unknown.
Yeah, it is a fairly large dataset depending on the tower location. For example, in an inner city locale you may have hundreds of devices on a single passenger train going past a local tower. These transient handsets used to cause a massive issue with drop outs and loss of signal as they would acquire and then drop service from a given tower. Nowadays we have solutions for this which centre around shaped beams along the direction of travel with communication between towers to ignore handsets which are moving along a travel corridor.
To make that clearer, imagine the overhead train line has passengers moving along and under the train line people are walking on the street. The various towers which are along the train line will pass information about which handsets are moving and which are local so the local towers can handle local handsets and specific towers above can handle the train customers. This keeps the lower towers from changing their directionality and dropping calls and data confections, but also allows the train handsets to have reasonable connection to the network.
Another interesting case is what used to happen at the edge of the range for a tower. The whole tower could modulate its power so it could reach a far off handset if nobody else was around, extending the effective range. This unfortunately meant that if someone came closer to the tower it would have to lower its power to not harm the handset and the person far away would lose signal.
Nowadays the power level can be handled per handset. Each handset gets a small portion of a second, actually a small handful of parts of a second, and the power of the tower is adjusted to reach them at their required level for their time slots. If someone comes online close to the tower you may have competition for the time of the tower and thus lower speeds but the power will still match your handset independently of the rest. Very cool technology, way better than what it was with GSM, and also much more secure.
Yeah, it is absolutely insane to think that as a person with a literal disability in attentional regulation I have had fewer collisions than most people who are not disabled. It seems like if it is too easy people stop trying and don't take it seriously, so they text or change the music or reach over the back. I know I can't do that without risking a major issue and I actively have to maintain focus, so I simply do not ever "let it slide" or "just this once". Rules can save lives if followed, but do nothing if ignored.
Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
I only finished it for the first time this year, after about 20 years of giving it a go, getting part way through, then forgetting about it. ADHD is evil. Still, it was fun, there were no long boring parts, nothing was grinding or luck based, and it felt really tight as an experience. Very well thought out, honestly I would consider it a masterpiece.
Put simply the radio broadcasts a sort of hello message to the tower so the tower knows where to listen (this is about signal direction or beam shaping, but imagine the eye of Sauron swiveling to see Frodo). This includes the identifier of the handset, the IMEI number, so that the tower can keep track of who is who. The second step of getting connected to the network is done with the details inside the SIM card, specifically the IMSI number.
If your phone has no SIM card you can still make an emergency call. You can also have an eSIM which is a software version of the SIM card. In both cases you can bypass the SIM and get connected.
If you turn airplane mode on the radio is powered off in theory, but this is not absolutely guaranteed. It should be off, the system will report it is off, but there are fringe cases where it may still be very slightly active, usually from malware or similar things.
So no SIM means no IMSI, but the radio itself has the IMEI and that handset is hard coded to that identifier. If the radio powers on it will broadcast the IMEI to negotiate connection with or without the SIM and IMSI.
This is heavily medicalised but yes, this is better than basically anyone from a conservative background could hope for. There is a lot of misinformation out there and it is easy to find an echo chamber that would support rejecting you, so keeping in line with his current sources is a good idea.
"It's basic biology, XX or XY, man or woman!"
"OK, but have you ever looked into intermediate or advanced biology?"
Dawkins is such a disappointing person. He has all the knowledge required to not only understand but also advocate for trans people but instead is defending the Anglican church, "light pedophelia", and gender essentialism. He wrote a couple of books with some good parts but honestly, he is a sad old man and should be forgotten. Science moves forward one funeral at a time.
Come on over to the open source free software world. Things are exciting and shiny and new while also working better every day. My most recent install of EndeavourOS took about 20 minutes with all drivers and boot stuff working correctly first try, as opposed to the multiple hour installs of 15 years ago. CalyxOS is awesome and has some really cool isolation between apps, not to mention ad blocking. And free hardware is becoming a real option with the newer RISCV stuff coming to market, allowing many more SOC designs to flourish.
I have been in to tech for about 25 years and it has never been cooler than right now with Valve bringing immutable Arch as a base for their OS and making proton work so well that I don't even check before trying things.
Also, man, some of the stuff coming out of the 3D printing works is just amazing. There is a guy who I follow who is working on solid state propulsion, another is working on 3D printed rocket engines, and another working on prosthetics. Cool things are still happening, just not on Windows or Mac.
UBI will cycle in the bottom of the economy.
When you give a rich person more money they buy assets and increase their wealth, it does not impact their spending activity and has no measurable impact on economic activity.
When you give a middle income person more money they buy something new or pay down debts. Buying something new stimulates economic activity, but paying down debts is really just another wealth transfer to the banks which are owned by rich people.
When you give money to low income people they spend it. They have unmet needs and always have something they can spend that money on. That money then generates economic activity.
Increasing economic activity is what all of the interest rate and inflation talk is about. If you get people spending money that generates activity which increases wages, increases income, and decreases wealth inequality.
A good example is during the GFC the Australian government gave low income people $750AUD, about $350USD. The prime minister asked people to spend this money rather than save it. People bought a bunch of things, in the people I knew it was mostly TVs and new clothes, things you can put off for ages but benefit from whenever you buy them. All of this purchasing stimulated the economy, leading to Australia being less impacted than almost any other G7 nation. We recovered very quickly and boomed from there.
If you want a more long term example look at any welfare. If you have extremely poor people they just die. They are underfed, have weak immune systems, and they face imminent death. They can't access housing so they end up on the street. They have tonnes of inteactions with police and end up in the criminal justice system. They end up having their lives ruined and being purely a drain economically. They suffer.
If you give them enough money to have housing and food they are not going to be as costly to manage. They won't require policing, they won't get sick as often, and they will suffer less. Will this increase the competition for the lowest cost housing? Yes, but the answer to that is to build more housing. Even with the impact to housing cost this will not result in 100% of that payment going to landlords. People don't pay their whole income for rent, they will buy food and other needs first, so if they are faced with too high a rent cost they will remain unhoused but at least tbey will eat.
Actual direct conspiracy is usually not necessary to achieve the outcomes of most nefarious things people worry about. Two rich people which both want to protect their own wealth can look at each other and their respective actions and then take next steps working to protect their wealth without ever talking to each other and get basically the same outcomes as if they had coordinated. Shared interests and a reasonable understanding of the likely outcomes of choices can be almost as good as direct conspiracy.
They have a device which progressively shines a light on a piece of paper while moving across the page and converts the brightness of the reflected light into an audio signal. Once it reaches the edge the paper is incremented and the process repeats. Each of these segments of sound are sent via a standard telephone connection to a similar device on the other end which uses the sounds to reproduce the image on the original paper on a new sheet of paper. This can be used to send forms, letters, black and white pictures, and even chain letters. It also forms the basic underpinning of a significant fraction of formal communications with landlords, employers, medical systems, government offices, and so on.
I have played a bunch of them, Twilight Princess was an absolute no for me for some reason, but I liked Ocarina and Majora when I was younger. I plan to play a decompilation of both of those soon, native resolution and performance etc. I enjoyed Link's Awakening as well, finished that on my original Gameboy back in the 90s, and Windwaker looks fun though I have only recently gotten onto a computer able to render it nicely, so that is on my play list.