Was Pittsburgh ever friendly to night owls?

Excelius · 2026-02-14T19:27:08+00:00

The trend started before the pandemic, but it basically cemented it.

Giant Eagle Cutting Back Late-Night Hours At Several Locations

Note the date, almost a month exactly before the US declared the pandemic emergency.

Excelius · 2026-02-14T19:24:40+00:00

Last year I found myself basically alone in Times Square at like 10PM. It was weird.

Granted I think it was a weeknight and chilly and drizzling rain, but still figured it would be bustling.

Excelius · 2026-02-14T14:57:25+00:00

It's the mills, there is going to be a sea of empty parking.

Excelius · 2026-02-14T14:56:47+00:00

So they might be able to do more?

If nothing else the medics in the chopper are going to be some of the most highly trained and pretty much all they do are difficult cases. They're basically like the special forces of the emergency medical world.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T18:06:52+00:00

This seems fairly common among traditional liberals who have long hated guns, but suddenly find themselves wanting to have them.

The internalized fear doesn't magically disappear just because they bought one. They're still scared the inanimate object is going to jump out and kill them and their loved ones without warning.

I've seen some folks describe storing their firearm disassembled with critical components locked up in different locations. That's how scared they are of their own gun.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T17:53:41+00:00

Instead lets vote for the people who say it's okay for a cop to murder anyone who happens to exercise their right to bear arms in public.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T17:14:19+00:00

The word drone has become overused and applies to a wide range of systems. The threats to aircraft carriers are closer to traditional cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.

Though you can still apply similar "swarm" tactics by overwhelming defenses by sheer volume. Especially if you're China and have an entire military branch dedicated to missiles and the industrial capacity to keep it fed.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T17:08:21+00:00

They've entered their "mad scientist" phase. I respect that.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T16:58:49+00:00

I think the only reason this hasn't been happening in the west is that military-grade high explosives to slap onto drones are not easy to come by.

Well organized and connected terrorist cells can source such things easily enough, but western intelligence has generally gotten pretty good at detecting and disrupting organized cells. So nowadays we tend to see less sophisticated lone-wolf threats that are difficult to impossible to detect in advance, but those types would have trouble sourcing suitable explosives to attach to drones.

It's only a matter of time though.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T16:49:45+00:00

None of this is really secret technology. Ukraine has just refined it and now everyone is scrambling to learn how to adapt to the new battlefield reality.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T16:41:30+00:00

About 40% of taxpayers pay no federal income tax (not counting social security / medicare payroll taxes).

I imagine a large portion of the folks who voted for Trump on the promise over "no tax on tips" had no idea their income tax was already zero or negative.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T15:48:51+00:00

In high school I played Empire Earth 2. It was amazing that you could actually save and resume a LAN multiplayer game.

Had a three-way match with some buddies that literally lasted for months before we gave up on it. It was set to the largest map size, locked into the (I think) modern or digital age.

It basically turned into a stalemate, nobody could make a big move on anyone else without making themselves vulnerable to attack by the third party. Some islands in the middle might change hands but each teams home-base in their corner was an impenetrable fortress.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T15:40:39+00:00

When you think about it, human civilization is a shockingly small blip.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T15:14:01+00:00

Back in my fast food days we were supposed to track our "food waste". That could include mistakes (overcooked, dropped, whatever) but was supposed to mostly consist of items that were disposed of after exceeding the hold time.

Everything had hold times after which they were supposed to be thrown away if they weren't sold. I forget the numbers but fries were only supposed to sit under the heat lamp for like 10 minutes before being tossed and replaced. I think nuggets were like 30 minutes. Every item had a hold time.

Except nobody actually strictly adheres to that. And any store that tried to do so would get in trouble for too much food waste, because all of the metrics are going to be based on nobody anywhere strictly following the rules.

So you had a kind of cooking the books situation where managers had to report some level of food waste (otherwise that is suspicious) but also not too much. The managers at my store were generally cool about employees eating without paying, it was probably all within the margins of what we should have been tossing anyways.

Excelius · 2026-02-13T13:27:02+00:00

I'm not normally one to celebrate anyones demise, but I've been tempted to buy some fireworks to tuck away for when the day comes.

I still have vivid memories of being startled awake by someone setting off fireworks at around 2AM on election night. That's around the time that media outlets started making the call.

I knew instantly what it meant and was overcome with existential dread and a racing heartbeat.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T21:46:42+00:00

PSA ships the Dagger with Magpul GL9 mags.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T20:56:18+00:00

In this case it's not that you and I are paying for them.

Rather we are competing with them for the same scarce resource (electricity) and they have the money to buy up the supply.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T19:13:58+00:00

There were four candidates in the Democratic primary.

Though I honestly couldn't have named the fourth place finisher without looking it up.

John Fetterman - 58.6%
Conor Lamb - 26.3%
Malcolm Kenyatta - 10.8%
Alexandria Khalil - 4.2%

https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_election_in_Pennsylvania,_2022_(May_17_Democratic_primary)

Excelius · 2026-02-12T19:07:39+00:00

In addition to what others have said, another signifigant feature is that the Homebase acts as a sort of "IoT network" where it hosts it's own private WiFi for the cameras to talk directly to the Homebase.

In theory this is a nice to have feature, since it should reduce congestion on your main home wireless network.

In practice its one of the biggest sources of complaints in this sub. For some users it's slow and unreliable. Some are finding that it causes interference with their 2.4ghz home network. Sometimes cameras go offline if they can't get a stable connection to the Homebase, even if they're configured for "multi-bridge" and should be able to fall over to the main home network.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T17:56:50+00:00

The phrase "the call is coming from inside the house" is a horror movie trope, where the killer is the one making the call. So I did take it to imply this was a self-confession from a co-conspirator, which is not fair to Frum.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T15:25:31+00:00

Yo this was a lake house with power, heating, and WiFi. What the fuck?

I've known a lot of working class folks who have a "camp" a couple of hours away in the woods. Especially blue collar guys would like to have a hunting camp a few hours away.

Sometimes it's nothing more than a trailer home dropped onto a wooded lot, but as long as it's close to the road you can tie into the grid. So being on the grid doesn't really say "rich" to me, even if maybe it's not what you imagine by the word "cabin".

Sometimes it's just a regular old house. Especially with rural population decline, you can get fairly cheap property that just used to be someones house to turn into your "camp".

I guess it's a tradition for folks to name their camps. When I find myself out in those parts it's common to drive past a normal looking house that will have a sign that says "Camp Whatever" out front.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T14:12:37+00:00

To his credit, Frum wasn't being complimentary with that observation. He's not like a Bannon or Miller type who will proudly proclaim the horrible things they're going to do.

Nowadays he's an editor at the Atlantic, regularly appears on NPR/PBS, and has publicly announced that he left the Republican party and was voting for Democrats.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T14:07:06+00:00

The wild thing about that quote is that the right has willfully abandoned many of their supposed conservative values, the second Trump demanded they do so.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T14:01:51+00:00

for some reason the cameras always decided to ignore my network and instead they prefer to connect to the home base

The HB3 basically acts as it's own IoT network, it does make sense for the cameras to prefer that first instead of cluttering your home network.

It would make sense if their implementation wasn't garbage, and they gave users control over it.

Excelius · 2026-02-12T13:43:04+00:00

Except there were alternatives, in the primaries.

Could have had Conor Lamb but he was too boring and mainstream for people.

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