I think it’s more that if you stop advertising, you start seeing a significant drop in sales. It’s an easy experiment to test.
The dark art is increasing sales via advertising. That’s where the marketing people pull off the real bullshit.
Apparently it’s mostly about familiarity. Even if we are annoyed at the time, we will often forget about it completely between then and shopping. By the time we are in the shop, we just have a vague sense of familiarity with the product. We instinctively buy the more familiar, as the “safer” option. It takes conscious effort to overcome this (which most people don’t have to spare).
In saturated markets, this leads to a zero sum situation. Every customer you get is stolen from a competitor. Apparently the tobacco companies actually loved the UK ban on tobacco advertising. Their ads were intended to counter the ads of their competitors. None of them were roping in new smokers at a high enough rate to matter. The only ones winning were the ad agencies.
There needs to be room to escalate. Ultimately he’s just a small fry patsie. By keeping it light, it sends a message, but makes it easy for police to keep it low priority.
There’s also the fact that we don’t even know if it’s related to his role. He might just have mouthed off at a couple of teenagers, and gotten “educated”.
It’s the one in Barcelona. I’ll edit for clarity. 👍
I still love that the basilica cathedral, in Barcelona, was designed upside down.
Stone only works under compression. If any area ends up under tension, it will just fall apart. String only works under tension, if it is under compression, it crumples. Critically, if you invert the model, the forces invert. The basilica was designed as a string model upside down. This made mismatched forces obvious, and is easy to correct.
Historical designers had a lot of tricks, that we have mostly forgotten, to make things work.
The extreme masochists begin to back slowly away in alarm.
The fuse is in the plug itself. It goes with the cable. That’s the point of it! 🤣 It lets you down rate your cables from the breaker rating.
The fuses aren’t to protect the circuit, they protect the end and intermediate devices. The breakers protect the actual circuit.
E.g. you’ve got a thin flex for a low power lamp. You don’t have to worry about a short allowing 40A to flow down a 2A cable.
Fuses mean protection is localised. If the socket is good for 13A, but the cable is only safe to 5A, you can fuse at 3A or 5A, and know it’s safe.
This is partially useful for extension leads. We don’t have to worry about overloading a multiway extension. If we do, it will pop a 10p fuse, rather than cause a house fire.
For safety, the BS1363 (UK, type G) is by far the best.
It’s fused. (Seriously why the hell aren’t all plugs fused!)
Live and neutral can’t be reversed.
Holes are gated (so no kids sticking spoons in).
High capacity, 240V at 13A gives 3kW of power.
It’s only real downside is its size.
It has several modes. The most basic is speech to text, pattern match, then implement. It also has text to speak for feedback. No actual AI in the loop.
It’s also capable of tying to AI models in various ways. It’s mainly intended for question answering. Either general, or about your data.
I personally don’t trust a non-deterministic AI having direct control of my house, so the split is useful.
It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.
Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.
It can, actually be done. It’s just inefficient and requires too much trust.
You either do a general broadcast of power. This is incredibly inefficient, at any real range. To get power to the edges, the power near the transmitter will likely be enough to cook your cat.
The other method is directed. You basically put out a power beam that improves efficiency. Unfortunately, you also now have a directable energy weapon in your living room. I wouldn’t trust something capable of cooking my brain, while I’m sat on the sofa, if it gets hacked.
Neither are likely viable for general use, though both could be useful under certain conditions.
Back tracking is FAR harder, ego wise.
Part of the goal isn’t to reverse it, but to slow further slips down the slope. They will remember the hassle it caused this time, and decide that it’s not worth trying for an easy life from the religious nutjobs, if the gamers will kick up more of a stink.
The goal is to stop them building up any momentum. If the credit companies get used to flexing their power like this, and steam gets used to folding to it, then things will escalate.
Right now it’s porn games. Who the hell would defend them. But it won’t end there. You honestly don’t think they would go after games that mock religion, or are trans positive?
The original tends to have a certain magic that makes it work so well. Whenever you remake something there’s the risk that the magic is diluted, or lost completely. It’s extremely rare to add more of what makes it work. Sequels often suffer the same problems.
Basically it’s not that remakes are inherently worse, they tend to be more average. It’s just that studios don’t remake poor shows. So we tend to see a lot more of the decline.
These can get an impressive range to a water balloon. Reduce the mass with an egg and 1/2 mile is likely (just) within range.
I would say stink bombs are even lighter, but I doubt Trump can even smell them, over his own stink.
I’ve got one of the bands (10, I think). That seems to be a solved problem. I can’t interact with it in the shower, but it doesn’t go haywire.
As for the heart rate, it’s at least consistent. It matches what my blood pressure measurements report, and follows exercise, rather than steps.
I’m bad at breaking or losing watches. I don’t buy expensive smart watches, I aim for a cheap, functional one.