“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.
I guess I would counter that the sort of project you have in mind isn’t likely to be part of what I’d call “consumer capitalism.” You’re building something as opposed to buying that thing.
Does this even appeal to anyone? “We can automate the only part of consumer capitalism that’s any fun?” Seriously?
Billionaires have so much money they literally can’t spend it all. A bot could blow $100K on their behalf and they could laugh it off as a funny story.
They’ve worked very hard to divorce their fate from the fate of the general public, that has worked, and it shows in ways they don’t even perceive anymore. They don’t have any reason to look for good deals. This is strictly an imaginary scenario for little people, from their point of view.
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.
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 ™.
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
The news stories about what a big bomb this is are so consistent and so numerous it starts to feel a little inorganic. Like maybe the powers that be aren’t so happy when a movie pokes fun at the powers that be.
I want to go see this.
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.
have prioritized large trucks and SUVs because they get better profit margins
And we have tariffs to thank for that, in no small part.
Well they’ve researched some new ways to kiss the emperor’s ass
I don’t know what to make of this.
It reads like someone who hates the president very much was ordered to write a piece softening this latest outrage. In the process, he points out that the president is exactly this malicious all the time, that it’s completely in character for him to say a thing like this and apparently to mean it, and that his fans cheered the idea of thousands or millions of Americans being killed by a foreign power. A light edit of the headline and the article could change the point its making completely.
Maybe the article doesn’t matter. Sure, I know we all read the article before reacting, of course we do. But how many people read the whole article these days? Maybe the headline and the outlet together (“CNN is saying…”) are the real payload.
Alito points to disputes involving LGBTQ+ rights as evidence that “support for religious liberty has cratered.” He cites cases involving businesses seeking religious exemptions from requirements governing services for same-sex couples or employee health coverage, including those that refuse to provide wedding services to gay couples or seek to limit health care for employees based on religious beliefs.
Corporations are people, and people are not people. That’s the “culture of life.”
The hypocrisy is the point. Pointing it out won’t stop them. Probably should point it out anyway.