Since the same 2 liter was like $1 at the grocery store, I thought we were gouging costumers and making bank on them, and figured the manager was being dramatic whenever inventory counts were off by a few.

Turned out we had a really raw deal with Coke, and were only charging like 25-50¢ more than we bought from for. And we were also required to order them from the distributor, to prevent us from stocking the cooler with cheaper ones from the grocery store.

As the article notes, Tesla conveniently “fixed” their thermals and durability issue that caused by inventing a feature called cabin overheat protection and marketing it as for people/animals overheating and not for the non-automotive-spec electronics in the cabin.

If you can’t bring auto quality electronics to the car, just change the car so it avoids standard auto thermal conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

No idea why it’s tucked into the Reminders app instead of Notes, but it’s been really handy since stumbling on it and a QoL improvement in my household over a generic Apple Notes list.

I recently got a few to try out, and expressly chose them because they do motion and sound detection on device and also support microSD for local recording.

I've only had them a few weeks so can't speak to any slow-showing pain points, but so far both the video doorbell[1] and two inexpensive cameras I purchased[2][3] to test out have been awesome.

I set up an automation so they record continuously when I leave and when home to record on detection only (motion for all three and sound for the Kasa camera) to try to be economical on wearing out the SD cards. But for me personally knowing I'll likely have those go out on me and need replaced was an ok trade off for the convenience, and probably a wash financially because everything I wanted happens locally whereas I kept seeing them gated behind a subscription plan when looking at other options.

There's also an option in the app to enable them to speak stream locally to a NAS or NVR via RTSP if you want to do that with them. So I can eventually set that up for more reliability when the eventual SD burnout occurs, and scratch my tinkering itch with things like streaming it to Frigate and testing it out vs the native detection features, without any actual presasure to need to since it all just works as is.

The doorbell is what I was originally needing the continuous local recording and on-device object detection for. The two cameras were bonuses I threw in to grab a few of their inexpensive models to try out while I was at it. And so far for about $100 in total I've been impressed. Key word being so far – they're still recent enough I might be in my honeymoon phase with them and just don't know it yet.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQQZZXH9

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08ZXJJTYJ

[3] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBPBSYMQ

Or sometimes I'll manually curate a field like that, and then ask it to generate an Excel function that can be used to produce as similar a result as possible for automated categorization in the future.

So in most cases I both want to provide it with tabular data, and also want tabular data back out. In general I've gotten decent results for these sorts of use cases, but when it falls down it's almost always addressable by tinkering with the formatting related instructions – sometimes by tweaking the input and sometimes by tweaking the instructions for the desired output.

The flap created for LASIK (and LASIK-like surgeries, such as SMILE or LASEK) heals, but doesn't have the structural integrity that occurs when the epithelium has to fully regrow like for PRK. So that flap becomes a semi-permanent weakness that can be dislocated down the road and cause problems.

In general PRK is still considered the safest laser surgery option, but trades off the long-term risk of the epitheium flap for a much longer initial post-op recovery time. With PRK you have to be careful that there's no hazing as the epithelium regrows, but once it's regrown it's as good as it ever was. So for folks with a high risk of future eye injuries, PRK tends to be preferred (or required, in some instances like the special forces).

A lot of tracking prevention mechanisms have started baking in CNAME uncloaking in the last few years precisely for that reason. Safari/WebKit[1], Brave[2], uBlock Origin (on Firefox only)[3], and NextDNS[4] just to name a few.

At this point the industry has moved onto straight up reverse proxying so it's all first party context. In milder instances it's in the form of server-side tagging[5] (which isn't a true reverse proxy, but can easily be used as one). But at least in those instances the website operators are the ones that typically own the server-side tagging process and have oversight/control/visibility into what they're putting in place.

But that has a high bar for implementation and relatively few companies have the resources or competence for that sort of thing. So it's much easier to persuade website operators to put a pure, dumb reverse proxy in place that gives them an endpoint under the first party domain to load resources from and send hits through[6]. Including being able to use HTTP set-cookie headers in the responses, while they're at it. Which is coincidentally the only long-lived cookie that still exists in Safari/WebKit, since things like "Keep me logged in" functionality would break if they started auto-purging those too.

If it's written in javascript, it's gone in 7 days even if it's first party. And if it's an HTTP header from a CNAME, it's also gone in 7 days. Only cookies set with an HTTP set-cookie header from a first party context are durable anymore. So that's exactly where advertisers are going into as an end-run in the game of cat and mouse - with surprisingly willing adoption from website operators, who are desperate to get their attribution back and don't quite understand the risk profile it exposes them to when they approve letting a third party operator masquarade so deeply as the website operator itself.

[1] https://webkit.org/blog/11338/cname-cloaking-and-bounce-trac...

[2] https://brave.com/privacy-updates/6-cname-trickery/

[3] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

[4] https://medium.com/nextdns/nextdns-added-cname-uncloaking-su...

[5] https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/serve...

[6] https://developers.google.com/tag-platform/tag-manager/first...

[7] https://webkit.org/tracking-prevention/ (towards the bottom of the page)

You do not buy a syringe for a 1000x markup. You stand up a group purchasing organization (GPO) as a subsidiary and spin off your entire procurement department to it. You have your negotiating team accept nominal trade discounts off catalog prices, and instead prioritize lump-sum off invoice rebates at various spending thresholds. So while you previously got a $50 syringe discounted to $25 from a supplier, now your group purchasing subsidiary is paying nominally less than ~$50 per syringe but recieving a lump sum rebate against accounts payable from a supplier equivalent to $25 per syringe based on your primary client's expected spending volume (which is pretty predictable considering your former procurement department turned subsidiary has been working with this supplier for ages).

The group purchasing subsidiary then adds a nominal markup of their supply catalog, say 20% or so. So that $50 syringe is sold to the hospital for $60. A 20% markup is considered fair and reasonable so your auditors give it their blessing. Suddenly the hosital is paying $35 more per syringe but the supplier is still getting the same $25 they always have. You also sign up another local hospital to join the GPO and negotiate even higher rebate thresholds. Both hospitals auditors and lawyers point to the industry wide practice of GPOs and their perceived benefits, making plausible enough defenses against both criminal and civil complaints. The executive team of the GPO that came over from their parent orgs and orchestrated this whole thing get generous (but fair market rate) employment contracts and benefits that just happen to absorb the maojrity of that $35 per syringe profit so very little ends up bubbling back up to the non-profit parent entities.

Do the same thing with selling your real estate to a real estate holding company, which leases it back to you at market rates (that just keep going up and up). Do the same with your nurses – spin up a nursing staffing company and contract all your nurse staffing through it. Same with physicians – spin off any directly employed physicians into a physician staffing company and conmtract with them for services.

As long as you follow the appropriate corporate formalities, you suddenly have a ton of knobs you can turn to engineer any particular operating margin you want your healthcare system to be perceived as having. This isn't limited to hospital systems, but with the prevalent level of inefficient middlemen entities that already exist in the US healthcare system and contribute to runaway costs, it's pretty damn easy to throw a few of your own into the mix in a manner that passes legal scrutinty around self-dealing. There are also plenty of liability-related reasons to justify such setups as well, so it's not purely a shift around profits from your tax-exempt non-profit entity.

And insurers don't actually care much at all about any of this. As they're required to pay out 80% of premiums as claims and only allowed 20% for administrative expenses and profits, the easiest way to increase profits is for claims to increase (and subsequently allowing the absolute value of that 20% piece to grow). If hospital charges go up across the board because of these sorts of shenanigans, that's as much a boon to the insurers paying out as it is to whatever lucky winners are siphoning off the profits from those related entity subsidiaries.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/research/regulating-health-insurers-a...

A single file can have multiple batches. A single batch can have multiple transactions.

For example, a company may upload an ACH file to their bank for payroll that contains a single batch in it and in that single batch they have entries for each employee's payroll deposit. Or maybe it has two batches – one for payroll deposits and a second one for reimbursements (or bonuses) that get deposited separately. Maybe it even has batches for things like 401k transfers to custodian accounts.

Their bank may receive that batch file, validate that and combine those batches with all the other ones it has and send those as a combined file to the clearing house.[3]

That said, nothing stops you from transfer if a file with a single batch containing a single transaction. Such as when you need to initiate an immediate transfer instead of collating it with all the other transactions at the end of the day.

At the end of the day, the ACH network is just a bunch of text files being pushed to sftp servers and servers periodically polling for new text files in those sftp directories to pick up and process.

[1] https://achdevguide.nacha.org/ach-file-overview

[2] https://github.com/moov-io/ach/blob/master/docs/file-structu...

[3] My understanding of this aspect is vague at best, so may be misconstruing how they're aggregated or passed through to the clearing house.

From reading [1] it looks like they've tightened up the requirements for it, and put some mitigations in place around counterfeits.

But it's also an opt-in process, so would be nice if they made it visible when you are or aren't purchasing from a seller utilizing it so you can decide yourself on a given purchase whether to go with the cheapest option or potentially opt for a more expensive listing but knowing that a product isn't commingled and was provided by the seller you're purchasing from.

[1] https://www.sourcing-monster.com/amazon-commingled-inventory...

But to publishers, increasing the volume of printed copies of a given title is absolutely not equal to a library purchasing a single copy and physically handling it in circulation until it naturally degrades to the point of being trashed. Physically printing brand new copies for patrons to keep every time a book was 'checked-out' would pose such a materially large impact on sales volume that publishers flat out wouldn't allow it.

Even a perpetual license to loan a single copy of an ebook can cost a library upwards of $100[1], due to potential revenue impact to publishers/authors from having it in circulation in perpetuity without physical deterioration naturally limiting it's lifetime/volume of loans. And the number of simultaneous loans for a given title is generally restricted to the number of individual licenses you've paid for. If that's the case even for ebooks, you can imagine what they'd require to print a title on demand and give it away to a patron forever.

[1] https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/a-new-twist-i...

Which is likely an incentive for libraries to not expose those costs on a per-request basis. As thebitstick mentioned here[1], libraries want to encourage usage. Overall usage volume has already been budgeted for, so the variances between one request and another for a typical patron won't materially impact the overall capacity of a library from serving their patrons. Inversely, if exposing the individual request costs disincentive enough conscientious patrons from making those requests, it makes it more difficult for the library to justify the service at all and could result in the loss of budget to continue covering it. Which ends up being a net loss of access for those patrons which do not have the means to access it elsewhere and were reliant on the library for it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31902549

Not that they really improve the situation itself, but you can also get USB-A to USB-C adapters[1] (and vis versa[2]). Having a few of both on hand has come in handy as I find myself having the wrong port available for the cord/device I need to plug into it. Which seems to be happening more and more often (both for charging needs and peripherals like you mentioned). Can be useful in situations when a dongle is overkill for your needs, or where a dongle isn't really an option to use for the USB-A/USB-C conversion (such as a charger).

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-Anker-High-Speed-Transfer-Not...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Syntech-Compatible-Chargers-Standard-...