Yes. But my point is that the IRS has a process for declaring and paying tax on income that you got illegally, whether it's from being a mobster or working without the right visa.

Capone didn't follow that process, so got done for tax evasion.

These illegal immigrants are paying their taxes, and therefore a) they aren't exposed to prosecution for tax evasion, and b) the IRS won't rat them out to ICE.

In a follow-up statement this afternoon, Potaka clarified that, in keeping with the Government’s policy, he’s changed his name to Tim Pawlenty.

*A current version of this story incorrectly referred to Tim Pawlenty as “Tama Potaka”

Yes, satire 'news' site, hence being posted to The Onion.

As with all good satire, there's a very tiny kernel of truth at the bottom of it.

Boeing doesn't make many of the parts in the aircraft, especially things like pressurization controllers. Those come from contractors like Honeywell.

What they do is design the systems around the parts, including selecting the desired level of redundancy, and commission the custom parts needed.

The 737 is still mostly a 1960s design built mostly to 1960s rules. There have been plenty of improvements but that's not the same as a clean sheet design built to be entirely automatic even when stuff breaks.

When you download a torrent, you're downloading it from someone else's computer. That 'someone else' is usually an individual, not some file sharing site with redundant servers.

When you download a torrent, someone had to send it. It's a small cost for individual torrents, but they had to pay for energy, internet connection, hard drives etc. If more people seed the torrent, you get a small bit of it from each seed, spreading the burden.

If no-one with the torrent has their computer on and seeding it, you cannot download the file, because there is no-one to download it from. If there are several seeds with the torrent, then you can still download it even if one or more seeds turn the computer off at night, delete the file, or are overloaded.

Yeah, I posted it to the wrong sub.

While immigrants in the country without authorization do not have Social Security numbers, they can file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, or ITIN.

Reports about 3m people file using an ITIN each year, and the number of people expected to legally use them is very small.

Also says they see about $12B more paid into social security by illegals than paid out.

As Al Capone found, the government is would rather you pay tax on illegally earned money.

I didn't notice until now that your characters sometimes slightly cover the text boxes! Very cool.

Even 95% is on the low side. Most residential-grade PV grid-tie inverters are listed as something like 97.5%. Higher voltage versions tend to do better.

Yeah, filters essentially store power during one part of the cycle and release it during another. Net power lost is fairly minimal, though not zero. DC needs filtering too: all those switchmode power supplies are very choppy.

NZ's Parliament was regularly described as "more Westminster than Westminster" until we moved to MMP in the 90s.

It has its bugs but it's far better than FPP and many alternatives.

However, the governor will not be apologizing for calling it ‘bags’ instead of ‘cornhole.’”

Mergers would work, too. Turn some of those tri-state areas into mono-state areas.

Oh, indeed. I'm just pointing out that terrible & illegal DRM is hardly a new practice.

You can't really have effective copy protection on any disc that can be played in a basic CD player; they're just too simple.

So Sony's approach was to put an autorun installer for a 'music player' on the disk too. If installed, it attempted to lock your CD drive from being used by any other software and couldn't be easily uninstalled. And they pirated open-source software (yes, that's possible) to build it.

SMH My Head.

Try the Sony BMG Rootkit, contained on music CDs:

In 2005 it was revealed that the implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs distributed by Sony BMG installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

Most of the current ships are 60Hz which doesn't work with the NZ grid.

The new ferries were explicitly going to be 11kV 50Hz to provide disaster response capabilities including power. Then they got canned.

The Dutch (Netherlands) and the Belgians are not the same...

Well, that's certainly the answer.

I wouldn't have thought you'd want to put a building quite that close to the waterfront even in a Fjord, but apparently they did.

SpaceX has enough of a lead over everyone else that I don't think them simply being denied government contracts is feasible, in a too-big-to-fail way.

You'd see some kind of forced nationalisation or being strongarmed into selling to another defense contractor on national security grounds.

Elmo might choose some kind of "if I can't have it, no one can" sabotage though.

I don't think the US/Canada usually does that style of power pole, with three phases on a crossarm and no neutral below.

Barriers on what looks like a pretty low-traffic low-risk road too.

I would think somewhere Scandinavia or central Europe. NZ wouldn't put barriers like that up.

Rock wall near bottom of picture screams old.

Indeed. Just need to remember that AI can and will hallucinate entire studies or court cases into existence.

'Reckless disregard for the truth' shows up sometimes, especially in e.g. defamation.

If the AI cites some legal case from 2015 or a random medical article, you probably need to ensure that those articles actually exist, and not simply assume that the AI is right.

If the AI said that a month's supply of Fentanyl is the recommended treatment for a headache, no reasonable person is going to believe it. That means that if you say that you believe that, the court isn't going to consider you a reasonable person.

IANAL either.

'Reckless disregard for the truth' shows up sometimes, especially in e.g. defamation.

If the AI cites some legal case from 2015 or a random medical article, you probably need to ensure that those articles actually exist, and not simply assume that the AI is right.

If the AI said that a month's supply of Fentanyl is the recommended treatment for a headache, no reasonable person is going to believe it. That means that if you say that you believe that, the court isn't going to consider you a reasonable person.

Do you mean empathy? Apathy is more like indifference

Interesting idea, but I imagine it suffers from similar issues to writing legal opinions: by signing your name to it, you're swearing that it's all true. Given AI's propensity for making things up, you need to check everything.

I wouldn't be surprised if 'knowingly filing a false appeal' is a reason to boot you off the plan in the first place.

B key vs M key. Laptop likely needs a SATA M.2 using B or B+M keying, you have a PCIe x4 drive with M keying.

And see if you can get it in writing, so you can collect a nice settlement on the way out.

Double check your final pay, too.

I'm not sure there are any power grids past the tens-of-megawatt range that aren't just a 2/3/4 terminal HVDC link.

Railway DC supplies usually just have fat rectifiers and transformers from the AC mains to supply fault current/clearing and stability.

Ships are where I would expect to start seeing them arrive, or aircraft.

Almost all land-based standalone DC networks (again, not few-terminal HVDC links) are heavily battery backed and run at battery voltage - that's not practical once you leave one property.

I'm sure there are some pretty detailed reports and simulations, though. A reduction in cost of multi-kV converters and DC circuit breakers is essential.

The problem is telling the difference between a good bike (noting that even Samsung screwed that up with the Note 7...) and these: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/fire-brigade-calls-for-e-bike-battery-clampdown-after-london-man-suffers-life-changing-burns

Aircraft typically have a limit of 100 or 160 watt-hours and require that the battery be separate or the whole device be small (think laptop sized) so that you can dump it in a fireproof bag.

An e-bike has a ~1kWh battery that is probably strapped or zip-tied in place and there's probably no serious firefighting equipment.

Cabin crew on aircraft have fireproof bags and rather effective fire extinguishers. Dealing with a battery in the cargo hold isn't possible.

If you want to carry a battery on an aircraft it generally has to be less than 100 (sometimes 160) watt-hours, whereas e-bike and other batteries are often 10x that.

It's not just that; it's that a regulator signed off on the bus, the city has liability insurance on the bus, and the bus manufacturer will themselves be accredited and insured.

Ah, it's been a while since I used ChromeOS. Looks like Flatpak was founded about the time I stopped.

Ah, it's been a while since I stopped using ChromeOS. That's an improvement.

PV inverters often have around 1-2% losses. This is not very significant. You also need to convert the voltage anyway because PV output voltage varies with light level.

Buck/boost converters work by converting the DC current to (messy) AC, then back to DC. If you want an isolating converter (necessary for most applications for safety reasons) that converter needs to handle the full power. If it's non isolating, then it's proportional to the voltage step.

Frequency provides a somewhat convenient method for all parties to know whether the grid is over- or under- supplied on a sub-second basis. Operating solely on voltage is more prone to oscillation and requires compensation for voltage drop, plus the information is typically lost at buck/boost sites. A DC grid would likely require much more robust and faster real-time comms.

The AC grid relies on significant (>10x overcurrent) short-term (<5s) overload capability. Inrush and motor starting requires small/short overloads (though still significant). Faults are detected and cleared primarily through the excess current drawn. Fuses/breakers in series will all see the same current from the same fault, but we want only the device closest to the fault to operate to minimise disruption. That's achieved (called discrimination, coordination, or selectivity) by having each device take progressively more time to trip on a fault of a given size, and progressively higher fault current so that the devices upstream still rapidly detect a fault.

RCDs/GFCIs don't coordinate well because there isn't enough room between the smallest fault required to be detected and the maximum disconnection time to fit increasingly less sensitive devices.

Generators are perfectly able to provide this extra fault current through short term temperature rise and inertia. Inverters cannot provide 5-fold overcurrent without being significantly oversized. We even install synchronous condensers (a generator without any actual energy source) in areas far from actual generators to provide local inertia.

AC arcs inherently self-extinguish in most cases. DC arcs do not.

This means that breakers and expulsion type fuses have to be significantly, significantly larger and more expensive. It also means more protection is needed against arcs caused by poor connection, cable clashes, and insulation damage.

Solid state breakers alleviate this somewhat, but it's going to take 20+ years to improve cost, size, and power loss to acceptable levels.

I expect that any 'next generation' system is likely to demand a step increase in safety, not merely matching the existing performance. I suspect that's going to require a 100% coverage fibre comms network parallel to the power conductors, and in accessible areas possibly fully screened cable and isolated supply.

EVs and PV arrays get away with DC networks because they're willing to shut down the whole system in the event of a fault. You don't want a whole neighborhood to go dark because your neighbour's cat gnawed on a laptop charger.

That's not really practical. For a lot of on-call roles, you need the experience of working on the equipment daily to know how to fix it.

Even if you alternated e.g. a week of on-call then a week of normal shifts, you end up reducing the amount of time you have that is completely non-work.

Firemen are absolutely not doing nothing until called out. There's training, maintenance, cleaning, post-incident paperwork, and probably other duties.

Most Fediverse stuff has web front ends so that any modern browser will work.

My concern would be that Chrome is about to neuter ad blockers, and you can't use a different browser without replacing the OS.

Both are also heavily privacy destroying.

Well, if that's not foreshadowing. US Election Day = Guy Fawkes Day.

The headline margin of error only applies at the centre (50%), and decreases towards the extremes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error#Specific_margins_of_error

Wikipedia says that for a poll with 1013 participants and the same headline margin of error, a 2% result would be ±0.8%.

It's more likely that this is the crowd who deliberately gives the most absurd answer possible.

Electric buses have a battery from a probably reputable supplier, with a decent BMS.

Escooters often come from AliExpress.

There is a difference.