“Frost free” refrigerators and freezers, even residential ones, work by heating the evaporator from time to time, melting the frost that inevitably forms there. This is one reason “frost free” appliances use more energy than the old fashioned ones that have to be defrosted.
I worked in an American grocery store for a while, and the employees, even the managers, did not take cooler temperatures seriously. They were eager to shrug off, make excuses for, anomalies. Because they were too busy, and a freezer meltdown (which happened as the result of malfunctions more than once) was a ton of work, a huge disruption.
Far from saving money, I’m sure an automatic monitoring and control system that raised an alarm at headquarters would have cost that store more money. But it also would have resulted in better monitoring. It would have done a better job than the people who were avoiding that job were doing.
Much later, I worked at an engineering sub-contractor for a hospital equipment manufacturer. One of my projects included adding automatic temperature monitoring and logging to some pretty simple OR appliances. Humans were supposed to be checking the temperatures of these things on a regular basis, but I got the notion that we weren’t trying to save staffing costs so much as we were trying to make sure the mandated monitoring actually happened. Who really has time to check the temperature of the blood cabinet every hour? When things get busy, that’s the kind of thing that gets skipped first. If anyone was even taking it seriously in the first place.
“We don’t say the stupidest things, we say things of common sense,” the president continued, just like a perfectly normal human who is not a secret lizard person.
You could say this about a lot of maladies, though.
I never had a migraine that caused me to collapse and lose consciousness.
What is up with the Guardian and initialisms? “FDA,” “TOR,” “BASF” and “EDF” are all caps, but “generally recognized as safe” is just “Gras” now? “Maha” instead of “MAHA?” I don’t get it.
you folks get angry when our governments, food organisations and consumers refuse to buy your food
Pundits and politicians sometimes make a fuss. Maybe some massively rich agribusiness jackasses are annoyed. I don’t think very many real people get angry.
You might say that this outrage is one of our inorganic exports.
…a long-awaited report delivered the official assessment of the US intelligence community: “The available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents,” read an unclassified summary.
Of course, if this were the result of some secret Russian beam weapon, “the US intelligence community” would probably want to keep our vulnerability under wraps. So, regardless of whether or not “Havana Syndrome” is the result of an attack, “the US intelligence community” is motivated to say it was not. And they’re the adults in the room, they’re the only authority on the matter.
This is part of why people are so receptive to conspiracy theories.
Mr. Smartass “This will run on my '486?” is memorialized forever.
When we say guns should be regulated to prevent mass shootings like this, we’re told the guns aren’t the problem. Mental health is the problem.
Well for once we caught one of these mental health victims alive. And now, close to 20 years after the fact, we’re going to address that mental health problem. By killing the guy. With guns.
And our dispute, apparently, is “Do we turn this mental health treatment into a gory spectacle, or do we do it on the down-low?”
It’s the Culture of Life ™.
I would have expected someone to adapt the fancy new HBM memory to traditional PC architectures instead.
Trump filed the lawsuit in 2022 against … people and entities he said conspired to undermine his 2016 campaign by falsely tying him to Russia.
But also
Trump sparked a wave of bipartisan shock and anger on Friday [9 Oct 2026] when he announced he was lifting sanctions on Russian diesel in a bid to lower prices
My half-baked theory is that many right-wingers don’t have any sense of aesthetics at all. Instead, they perceive signifiers. Which is why so many of them like ugly tacky garbage, as long as it looks shiny and new and expensive.
Plastic surgery can be a signifier – if it’s obvious plastic surgery. That’s where “Mar-a-Lago Face” comes from.
Years ago, in the early 20-teens, I had posted on HN in protest to some new web property that aimed to tie yet another aspect of life to cell phones. I said something like “I work in software but I still don’t have a cell phone, I don’t like them, I don’t want one, I don’t want yet another aspect of modern life to encourage dependence on some subscription service like a phone.” Which was all true.
This attracted rather more reaction than anything else I posted on there. The reactions fell into a few categories:
Any illusion I had that the HN people were software-loving geeks like me kind of dissolved after that, and I stopped visiting. I suppose that’s exactly what they wanted.
People in positions of privilege very often tell on themselves when they dismiss anything that challenges their worldview as “political,” and therefore inappropriate for whatever “no politics, please” forum they’re in. It doesn’t mean they’re stupid, but it does mean they’re stunted. They would be better leaders if they had broader horizons.
The hypocrisy is the point. Pointing it out won’t stop them. Probably should point it out anyway.