I used to regularly use these at the Uni of Leeds in the Roger Stevens lecture theatre building. Never saw an accident. Freshers were told that they turned upside down when going over the top but in fact they just slid sideways to the next shaft (we used to ride over the top sometimes to beat a queue going down) but they could apparently jam if too many people tried it so it was frowned upon by the porters.
Got to ride one of those in the Bat'a building in Zlin, Czech Republic. Supposedly that version had some sort of safety mechanism to keep you from crushing your arm off if you didn't have it tucked inside, but I didn't dare test it. We called it a "Mario elevator" due to the obvious similarities with the elevators in the original Super Mario Bros.
"Their overall rate of accidents is estimated as 30 times higher than conventional elevators. A representative of the Union of Technical Inspection Associations stated that Germany saw an average of one death per year due to paternosters..."
Wow - those were definitely different times in terms of acceptable risks in various aspects of life.
Modern times obviously improved a lot of it, but if you're at least a bit cynical, you also have to wonder how much, due to those measures, people are "prevented" from having to build out their awareness of surroundings, dexterity and overall "aptitude for life".
Sure, but that doesn’t really change the comparison of risks. Escalator rides, for example, are just plain old more dangerous than car rides regardless of why, just as car rides are just plain old more dangerous than train rides.
Do you think Coca Cola advertises to get you to go buy a coke right now? United Airlines expects a click-through to get you to book a flight right there and then with no planning or talking to your spouse? Think Audi expects you to click their facebook ad and order a car online?
No, they want to become ingrained in your mind. So to them, just exposing you to their ad is enough. Whether you click on it or not is irrelevant.
I keep a low effort fuzzy mental list of things that advertise themselves in ways I find unpleasant. They are the first thing I think of when I go to buy something, but the last thing I'll ever buy.
An example: The North Face edited wikipedia to change the photos of famous hikes/outdoorsy locations with people wearing North Face jackets with the logos visible.
Wow, I hadn’t heard of this before but it’s actually disgusting and despite this happening some time ago they just got added to my shit list of companies I won’t buy from.
“North Face Brazil’s CEO said in a statement. “With the ‘Top of Images’ project, we achieved our positioning and placed our products in a fully contextualised manner as items that go hand in hand with these destinations.””
5/2019: The North Face, in a campaign with advertising agency Leo Burnett Tailor Made, hatched a scheme to get its products to the top of Google Images by replacing Wikipedia photos with its own product placement shots.
In the promotional video, the company notes how all trips begin with an initial Google search, and often the first image that shows up is from a Wikipedia article about the destination. ...
The video brags about how North Face cleverly hacked the results to get its products to the top of Google search, “paying absolutely nothing just by collaborating with Wikipedia.” Only, it wasn’t a collaboration at all; it was a violation of Wikipedia’s terms of service for paid advocacy. ...
> An example: The North Face edited wikipedia to change the photos of famous hikes/outdoorsy locations with people wearing North Face jackets with the logos visible.
I hadn't heard of this but it is beyond sleazy in my book. Though, to the company's credit, I cannot fault for the actions of likely one or a small group of marketing people. Though I don't know, maybe, that type of idea had visibility all the way to the top.
It's not because I want something that I actually need something. I've wanted to build a UPS with lithium batteries for a while, my ads are all BMS, lithium cells, etc... This is definitely good for advertiser, but as one of the "people", all I see are hard-to-resist ads.
AliExpress is especially good at this for maker gear, I'll look at a reflow station and they will spend the next 6 months showing me reflow station ads until I cave and buy it, even though it is a purely frivolous purchase.
Personalized ads are extremely effective when your profile is good, but that does not mean that I don't see it as a bad thing.
I think personalized ads are way worse, because they entice you to buy products you actually want. Buying things is usually a bad idea, so personalized ads make this problem worse.
There is a type of advertising called "brand advertising" where the goal is more about brand awareness (e.g. think of a Coca-Cola superbowl ad) than "direct response advertising". Such advertisers don't really care if you click on ads, but they still want to reach high-value users.
I’m pretty sure most meta-originated ads are direct response. At least most of the ones I’ve seen. Most brand advertising shows up in places where engagement is hard (eg TV, billboards) while direct response is perfect for absentmindedly scrolling (you don’t feel bad clicking away).
Wikipedia has a list of premature professional wrestlers deaths, look for the ones that died of heart attack before 50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_premature_professional... - the roid era really did a number, though of course, working through pain and injury with the help of pain killers and other drugs didn't help either.
Aside from the normal risks of injury there is the simple fact that many athletes would take the risk. I think it's morbid but top level athletes probably already deal with things that would make the normie sports fan queazy. They'd do it happily for the status and adrenaline
Yep but that's true of many sports. In fact most sports at high levels involve a heightened risk of life-changing injury. It's a difference of degree rather than type.
Not that that invalidates your criticism but it does require it to be formulated in a more nuanced way.
The biggest problem isn't that the highest-level athletes would waste away their bodies (that's a big problem, but not the biggest); it is that below them, there will be thousands if not millions of second- and third-level athletes doing the same. With much less control.
Imagine if every kid out there that wanted to be the next Ronaldo or Neymar (and could afford it) started taking steroids and EPO. That's a huge cost, and what did we gain exactly? A slightly lower number on some clock?
The argument that I’ve heard against this is that pro athlete training is already really dangerous - yet athletes are valuable enough that their handlers have some incentive to be reasonably cautious to not push things too far most of the time.
Of course, we also know of many many athletes that have been permanently injured during training, so it’s hard for me to know how true the above is.
Can this tool help to simplify self hosting implems? K3s was recommended to me to replace my personal pile of systemd units starting docker compose configs and manual reverse proxy configs.
Check out https://kamal-deploy.org, it just hit 1.0 and 37signals moved their whole Kubernetes stack to it. I was playing around with it recently for side projects and I think it's a nice fit for simpler products like that.
Lol no. Docker Swarm, Nomad, even ancient Pacemaker are all simpler and easier to use than k8s. I don't think there's a single feature k8s adds over those options that is actually useful in a non-Enterprise use case (especially homelab stuff, assuming the point of your homelab is not learning k8s).
I use it for self hosting. It really simplified my reverse proxy config like you said. I use the internal networking between services quite a bit. I have it auto-provisioning volumes on my NAS and using them via NFS. I love it to death and would say it has simplified my setup overall. But the upfront cost of learning k8s is indeed high.
Seconding this as well. Similar setup (though I opted for longhorn) and journey. I'm very grateful for learning k8s but man, it was definitely rough for a long while until I really understood all the pieces and cemented my understanding. I can very much appreciate that's a tall order for many people and not wanting to embark on that journey unless there's a good reason.
Start with hashicorp nomad. Less of a learning curve and easy to set up. Traefik can do automatic discovery of services in nomad. Definitely better than a bunch of systemd units.
This article makes me think about "tofu-dreg projects" [0]
Poor quality construction work prevalent in mainland china. If you
look for content with this keyword, you will find jaw dropping
videos of constructions workers bending or breaking "rebar" with their hands,
Owners chipping away concrete in high-rise buildings like its sand, etc.
Of course some of this can be propaganda, but considering it has a local name,
there must be truth to it.
It does have a propaganda feeling to it. I went thru the top 25 YouTube videos for tofu dreg recently, and they had that undertone of hoping for China to collapse.
There are crappy building practices in any country. The real question is prevalence, which I can’t seem to answer.
Then where are the videos of western tofu dreg? China has a literal army of propaganda posters. Am I supposed to believe such problems exist and it never occurred to them to push it?
> In July 2021, another occurrence of tofu-dreg construction happened in Zhengzhou in Henan province where the entire city was put at a standstill due to torrential rains and flooding. The city was referred to as a “sponge city” because of how vulnerable the drainage system was. Some argued that the city was not to blame since they were experiencing unprecedented rain levels, but there was evidence later found pointing towards a weak infrastructure.
Damn, sounds like NYC this past week. Here's one of many videos:
I'm not totally sure I understood what tofu dregging was, but there's no shortage of low quality construction, collapsing bridges, unmaintained infrastructure, etc. in the US.
Fascinating. Within the past 2 years, the US suffered 98 people killed in a condo collapse, and a fairly serious (though thankfully non-fatal) bridge collapse. There's also the especially egregious case a bit further back of the New Orleans levies failing during Katrina. Must have been undercover Confucians.
I could provide examples all day of how Chinese culture and the CCP allows this type of phenomenon to continue unabated.
It isn’t to say that there are serious infrastructure concerns in America that continue to go unaddressed.
But the scale of graft and shoddy construction in China beggars belief. It extends into every aspect of enterprise, taking shortcuts is the absolute cultural norm.
Except that now he's put this into the public domain, DC can also do what they want with it to the extent that anyone else can.
It doesn't hurt DC financially, other than potentially diluting the Fable brand because anyone else can also use it now. There's also a strong likelihood that DC do in fact own partial copyright over anything that isn't the comic - so any figurines, film spinoffs, etc., in fact anything that wasn't wholly created entirely by Willingham, even if he still owns the underlying IP, so people almost certainly aren't free to make copies of anything other than just the comics.
Also I don't understand why my comment (the GP to this comment) was been moderated down so much. Is it just that my opinion is unpopular with fans and so it was downvoted rather than debated? For instance, re my comment about public domain vs explicit license there are many articles like this: https://www.techdirt.com/2015/01/23/why-we-still-cant-really...
IANAL obviously, but nothing now stops me from selling T-shirts, figurines and lunchboxes of fable with my own drawings/designs. Any such sale is money not in DC pockets.
Sure, you can make whatever you want from the original designs (but note not from any elements from figurines or films or anything else DC made that deviate from the comics).
However, that in and of itself isn't depriving DC of anything, as they're no worse off financially than if whatever you make never existed. Arguably, if you create something that's a runaway financial success, and someone has to choose between buying your thing and the DC produced thing, then sure maybe then DC loses a sale. But sales are rarely binary like that. If you do something that promotes the brand, it probably benefits DC's sales as well.
The only thing that might actually impact on their profit is someone producing an exact copy of the original comics, at a lower price, and of better quality. Even then, people might still buy the DC version so it matches the rest of their collection. And if it is an exact, exact copy of the original comic, there's always a risk there might be something with a DC copyright on it, e.g. the font that's used in the title, maybe a reference to some other DC property, etc...
In his version there were multiple levels of speed for entry/exit of transit so the main highways were going really fast.
IIRC it required some dexterity to use and sounded a bit dangerous...