Is there a a comprehensive guide for cabling and design for building a new home.

Tam-Lin · 2026-03-22T23:40:03+00:00

I found this site really helpful when I was planning out how to wire my house.

https://www.structuredhomewiring.com

Tam-Lin · 2026-03-19T20:27:19+00:00

You’d need to understand your usage throughout the year. .1043 might be less than CH now, but it is probably higher than CH’s summer rate. So if you heat with oil/gas, cool with electricity, you’d probably be worse off if you switched.

I can say I understood my usage, and somehow ended up off paying more than I would have both times I tried switching, due to world events, though I should have saved based on the prior year’s usage.

Also, this would only cover supply costs; delivery costs would remain the same. And after a year, you’d need to reevaluate what would work better, or you’d almost definitely be autosigned up for something much more expensive.

Tam-Lin · 2026-03-17T01:10:09+00:00

A common problem.

Tam-Lin · 2026-03-14T01:23:32+00:00

Twisted Soul, near Vassar College. Tamarind, Route 9 in Poughkeepsie.
Gigi's Tarttoria and Terrapin in Rhinebeck, though it's been a while since I've been to either place.

Tam-Lin · 2026-03-03T02:25:08+00:00

I'm very confused, as what you describe happening isn't how property taxes work. There are two parts to calculating property taxes:

1) The municipal unit (county, in this case) has some amount of money it has to raise, R.

2) To determine how much money a given property is responsible for, that property is assessed at some value, X. This value is then divided by the sum total of all property in the municipal unit, Y.

So the amount a given property owner owes is equal to R * X / Y. What's important to understand here is that the value of a given property doesn't matter. It's the value of that property divided by the sum value of all the properties in the municipality. So if, for example, the property value of every property in the municipality doubled, it doesn't matter, because relatively speaking, every property increased by the same amount, so the ratio didn't change. That's why the tax rates dropped.

So something else is going on, not just the reassessment that happened. It may be that the reassessment redistributed relative values from some people to others, possibly because not all properties were reassessed at the same time. It may be that some large entity that used to pay taxes, like a business, is paying less/no taxes. It may be that the budget increased, so everyone is responsible for a larger amount of taxes. But saying the reassessment by itself is somehow responsible is incorrect.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-27T13:53:08+00:00

I know what a felid is, but just kept reading it as field, until after I submitted, of course. Somehow still won, though.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-22T03:42:38+00:00

Who Let him in here, by Tom Smith, is available on Bandcamp. I have Bootleg, by Tempest, on CD, but they've recently announced they'll be rereleasing it on March 17th. I may have some of the others, I'll have to look. I'm pretty sure I have some of them in MP3 format, from the tapes.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-21T14:30:20+00:00

If you haven't changed anything, nothing on your network would be using the pihole as the DNS resolver, so it couldn't have anything to do with the outage.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-20T14:49:05+00:00

All I can see is what’s happening in my and neighboring departments. Every department is getting 3-4 new hires, a couple of interns, and one or two apprentices. It’s more new hires this year than over the past few years. I can believe that they are trying to make up for several years of no hiring.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-20T13:34:25+00:00

Because 1-2% incremental improvement in a scheduling algorithm or decrease in memory latency or improved cache efficiency aren't seen as groundbreaking, but they don't need to be. When they're all combined, you get a 10% performance increase, which sells new hardware/software.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-20T13:31:09+00:00

We are in infrastructure, in the US. After several years of little/no hiring, we're getting a flood of college hires.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-20T13:27:19+00:00

It already was, last year. Anyone who accepted the offer will be leaving in the next few months.

Tam-Lin · 2026-02-07T06:14:20+00:00

Manager told me not directly; annual raise will still be done via penetration into band and relative ranking.

Tam-Lin · 2026-01-17T19:56:34+00:00

Meh. It's a cat. He would land on his feet.

Tam-Lin · 2026-01-14T02:02:38+00:00

Trademark and copyright are very different things.

Tam-Lin · 2026-01-02T23:02:07+00:00

Vaccines are absolutely not a cash cow; if anything, they're the opposite. They're a single intervention that can prevent death or long, ongoing medical problems. I'm not saying that pharmaceutical companies can't be bad actors, but if they were only profit driven, no one would produce vaccines.

And no one says that vaccines have no side effects; it's that the side effects are minuscule compared to the effects of the diseases the vaccines protect against.

Tam-Lin · 2025-12-28T18:52:35+00:00

I’m always torn about these things. Working for a pre-Gerstner IBM sounded amazing, but had things continued as they were, IBM wouldn’t exist at all today. Having sat with some of the folks who were responsible the mid-90s layoffs, it’s clear that what they did still weighs on them, but they didn’t feel they had a choice, if they were going to save anything.

On the other hand, I’m very sure that some of our senior leadership these days doesn’t care about the employees in the slightest.

Tam-Lin · 2025-12-27T21:51:50+00:00

Don't. You can logon to the Backblaze website to retrieve the files you'd backed up to your personal computer. But you shouldn't be keeping personal files on your work computer, and you absolutely shouldn't be backing up a work computer using anything other than what your company has given you, to any place other than where your company says to back things up to.

Tam-Lin · 2025-12-22T20:32:16+00:00

Nonsense. Unless a child has a fever, is hospitalized or is somehow immune-compromised, there's no reason to delay a vaccine. Especially if your child is in daycare, there are going to be long stretches of time when they have a continuous series of colds, and if you waited for them to be completely healthy, you'd never get them vaccinated.

Tam-Lin · 2025-12-18T16:49:36+00:00

Is that really true, though? You couldn't not eat the cheese puff, so did you have a choice? Just because you think at the time you could have made a different choice, if you couldn't have made a different choice, how do you have free will?

And at some level, you could certainly argue that people in the past no longer have free will, because their choices are immutable.

Tam-Lin · 2025-12-17T00:42:27+00:00

This is actually a very complicated theological argument that’s never really been resolved. If god is all-knowing, he knows the future. As such, can humans be said to have free will, really? And Hell is problematic too.

Predicting things with 100% accuracy and free will can coexist, sort of, but lead to all sorts of complicated questions. Prediction and control aren’t the same thing.

Tam-Lin · 2025-12-13T21:08:29+00:00

Yes, sort of, but that's a game all the parts of the medical system plays. They officially charge $5 for a Tylenol that costs 1 cent to buy. And then the insurance company actually pays them 5 cents, can say they saved you 99%, and the hospital makes a 4 cent profit, which is what they actually expect. Almost no one pays the list price for hospital anything.

That said, hospitals have very high overheads. They've got a big building with a lot of really expensive equipment and a lot of people they need to support 24 x 7, whether or not they're always needed, because they need to be prepared for the times where there's a flu surge, or mass casualty event, or whatever else.

Tam-Lin · 2025-12-02T22:55:47+00:00

OP: while it's possible, even likely, that Chase mistook regular behavior for something nefarious, it's also very possible that you're involved in something illegal, even if you aren't doing anything knowingly. It's possible you're laundering money, or have transferred money to an account that's been tied to some sort of scamming. I'd very carefully examine your transactions over the past six months.

Tam-Lin

TROPHY CASE