they might be (or formerly have been) there in order to operate plumbing shutoffs in the crawlspace without entering the crawlspace, according to hellsite: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/i2yku9/these_two_metal_bars_going_into_the_floor_in_my/
though now you probably can't tell without going down there since you pulled them out. Maybe pull both out and use a flashlight and a phone camera in the two holes to get an idea
uhhh nonfiction
jk jk. But I don't think "genre" even really applies to nonfiction, but I guess the analog would be "subject". My library lists This Soviet World under:
Communism — Soviet Union
Soviet Union — Politics and government — 1917-1936
Soviet Union — Social conditions.
If you wanted to give it a genre descriptor that was less literal, you might call it like, a polemic or a social history (that one might be a stretch idk) but someone more eloquent than me might come up with a better summation
A bunch of the 
posts about that shipping company describe similar experiences/say that theft is rampant. Which kinda checks out since it's aliexpress and so the level of support, and people even bothering to dig in and try to figure out where their packages are is rare. I think it's just an off brand gig work thing where people sign up on their phones and then start delivering packages.
But it could also just be your dorm (though that would be unhinged behavior by them IMO)
sure. I just don't see a lot of historical examples of that working, personally. I guess you could organize your coworkers against the evil shit, but well compensated engineers tend to be pretty morally flexible in my experience, and not easy to meaningfully organize towards any goal.
And as a cog in the machine you are replaceable, and your work up until that point will then continue to be used for ends you have no control over even if you stuck to your principles and quit when asked to participate in something reprehensible. IMO it's easier to not get into a field that has a lot more potential for genocide than it does for improving society, than it is to minimize your harm once you're there and basically guarantee you'll be forced to make very hard morally compromising decisions.
The risk isn't just "what if my field in general is used for evil and I feel bad about it" it's also "there's a very high likelihood this field is going to put me in a situation where it's losing my livelihood or abandoning my morals and I don't want to have to make that choice"
not just the airport, pretty sure they have it at the mall now
I've heard it's been used in the UK to ban shoplifters. The false positive rate in that is pretty high (makes sense if you think about it, 99.9% accuracy still means you're going to falsely ban a couple people a day in a busy store), especially if they fall on the wrong side of 
and here's the long version (24 mins which I guess isnt that long by youtube standards these days):
I think in this context its the desire to reclaim perceived losses, both material and social. Originally it was more in reference to reclaiming lost territory specifically? Basically just RETVRN fascists/MAGA types (in the literal sense)
I know people who permanently lost feeling in parts of their face because of dental surgery (and that's after a longish painful recovery) Risking that just to remove a non-painful, not even impacted tooth, is insane to me
its also much cheaper to go abroad yeah. Canada I have no idea how quackish their dentists are but I believe they're in the "teeth are luxury bones and therefore not covered" school of universal healthcare
I have become incredibly skeptical of american dentistry. They can't seem to get their act together on what's actual necessary care and what's just some shit they can charge out the nose for. I've drawn my personal line at wisdom teeth, which they will usually try to extract surgically regardless of whether it's causing any problem or not. After the number of times I've had "no surgery is without risk" reinforced from both experience and medical doctors, that seems incredibly foolish. See also: Lasik
Capitalism ruins everything
"huh that video title/description sounds kinda interesting..."
*clicks*
semi serious question.
I stumbled onto my local metro area's reddit while trying to look up some historical photos and stared into the abyss for a few mins.
I resisted the urge to leave libreddit and make an account just to reply but, I ran into this post that is basically complaining about having a car in one of the most central neighborhoods in the city, and asking for advice on getting off street parking (in reality, anything that isn't an overpriced surface lot that offers no protection is going to be quite a hike away from their apartment, there's no way this will work out).
They claim they work in X first ring suburb where "there are no buses" and that's why they have to have this car, which is hilarious because they could one seat ride to half of that suburb in under half an hour from a bus that leaves from their front door. the other half it'd be a 2 seat ride but still under 45 mins, and obviously way cheaper than a car. There are also plenty of neighborhoods they could move to that would have less breakins and cheap off street parking, but they seem convinced that's not the case.
But I digress.
The fellow ers in there commiserating about how horribly expensive off street parking is (in a neighborhood that is basically in downtown) got me thinking... If we can't get city governments to do shit about on street parking and massively unsafe roads, is allowing the street to be so unappealing to park on that people have to actually pay for their giant waste of precious urban land, a viable option to improve things?
this expectation that you should be able to just leave your 2 ton death box lying around in public anywhere for any length of time and nobody will so much as touch it doesn't apply to any other kind of property (just look at bike theft), and it really fucks with people when you violate that. I feel like that's a usable weapon, in a way, against gentrification and car dependency and traffic violence.
Were kia boys doing praxis?
These fucking dipshits lol, its winter, so the trees are missing leaves and there's coal smog on everything, which was in wide use in the west just as it was in the east because it was cheap and domestically abundant. The reason it held on longer in the east after reunification is because the east was economically hollowed out and coal continued to be cheap compared to retrofitting in modern heating.
Here's a picture from the late 60s(?) that's not in winter (though it unfortunately frames out the large trees that are visible in the foreground of the reddit OP):
not on lake superior it aint