GFCI works correctly either way. Their operating mode doesn't care at all about ground: Whether bonded, not bonded, or not even present (look, ma! only two wires!), they still perform the same way.
They respond to an imbalance in current flow betwixt line and neutral. What goes out must return; if it doesn't, then switch off.
My boss uses Reddit some. I'm banned. At the shop, we use the same IP address (and we do not use ipv6 there).
I tried to log in with a ~10-year-old account that I'd never commented with. A perfect Beetlejuicing moment had arrived and I just wanted to play the game with a short, snarky comment.
It logged in fine, and then: Insta-ban, just like that. (Maybe I should have used a new browser on a new network that I've never used before, but whatever -- nothing of value was lost here.)
Meanwhile, the boss man's access continued unimpeded; this suggests that it is a rather targeted contagion.
And it seems to follow the systems, not the networks.
(If anyone wants banned, just let me know. I seem to have a well-poisoned system to play with.)
Your concept is certainly is interesting to think about, and I think that is a clever approach with a high cromulence quotient. I like it quite a lot.
But in this world, the result of the approach would have no value to me. At the end of the day, Reddit is terrible. For me from my perspective, it can never be anything other than terrible. Studying its ways cannot redeem it, nor improve my life in any way. Seriously, fuck those guys.
So while I appreciate the suggestion, I must respectfully decline.
(Unless, of course, the result would be useful for others such as yourself. If that is the case then let me know and I may elect to spend some time on it.)
I recently built a reasonably-complex embedded controls project using codex and an esp32.
Starting with systems stuff like "Set up vscode with whatever it needs to work with codex and talk to an esp32," and ending with "Now add a web interface with persistent tunables that always runs in both AP and station modes," my prompt inputs were very terse.
And it'd just kind of go forth and just do it. It'd even design and run its own tests.
I never once looked at the code. For all I know, the code doesn't even exist.
And it works. I'll be using it in the field (in the proverbial middle of nowhere) all next week. I have every expectation that it will behave itself.
(I did spend a lot of time defining and refining some ground rules with AGENTS.md, but in theory I get to re-use that effort for the next go.)
Rather less-succinctly: I never got into vinyl and have never owned a turntable that wasn't built down to a price. I do still have my shelves of CDs, and it keeps slowly expanding. I usually listen to Spotify because it is convenient and portable and -- these days -- lossless.
But my sister and her old man have put together a quite decent stereo system with a mix of vintage and modern gear in recent years, and also started a a rather serious vinyl collection. While there's certainly no romance there on my end, it's a lovely and deeply-involving experience to hang out with them in their tiny little city-dweller living room and spin records into the wee hours; sometimes for just one track, and sometimes for entire albums.
I definitely prefer the way my own stereo, which I've built over the course of decades, sounds. It's detailed and big and it does all the things; it is by all technical measures very superior. But we have a lot more fun listening to vinyl at their place than we have playing CDs and Spotify at my place. The process -- and indeed, the inconvenience -- of playing vinyl makes it all much more visceral.
> Not only should you get rid of them, but also they are a fire hazard.
Are they not a fire hazard even when new? MOVs do tend to degrade with use (especially after they've gone conductive to snuff one or more surges). But AFAICT we can't really know, without potentially-destructive testing, whether a given MOV is in good shape -- whether installed last week, last year, or 30 years ago.
> Also, do not accidentally plug surge protectors into each other, metal oxide varistors can star fires _without_ meaningful surge conditions when you do so.
What is the mechanism that increases risk for MOV-sourced fires in this arrangement?
I've also noticed that many of the power supplies I've taken apart (for very pedestrian consumer goods) have internal MOVs on their line input. Whatever the mechanism is that increases risk, isn't using one external surge protector already doing that in these instances?
> I prefer to buy products without MOVs entirely due to the risk, with the exception of one, Tripp Lite Isobars; but I prefer to use series mode protectors such as Brickwall or SurgeX.
I prefer to avoid MOVs, too. Broadly-speaking, diodes seem like a better way to do it. (Transtector is another reputable brand that uses diodes.)
---
That all said, I've noticed over the years that problems with dead (presumed-to-be-hit-by-a-power-surge) electronics tend to follow particular structures. And the reason for this seems related to grounding more than it is anything else.
So when I find someone (a friend, a client, maybe someone online that I'm trying to help) complaining about repeated damage, I often ask about grounding. Almost always, it turns out that they've got multiple grounding points for the electronics: The electric service has one ground rod, and the telephone/cable feet/satellite/whatever is connected to some other ground.
This might be a dedicated rod, maybe a metal pipe; whatever it is, it is distinct from the main service ground. It happens all the time. (It is worth noting that the NEC prohibits this kind of configuration unless extraordinary effort is put forth. See 800.100(d), for example.)
The way that MOVs -- and avalanche diodes alike -- behave combines with the fact that the earth is an imperfect conductor, such that having multiple ground points promotes dynamic ground loops that can provide quite large potential -through- the electronics that we seek to protect.
The problem appears suddenly, and repetitiously. Everything is fine, and then ZANG: The cable modem gets smoked along with the router it is connected to. So the modem goes back to Spectrum or wherever to get swapped, and the router gets replaced again, until the next time: ZANG.
TV connected to satellite receiver, with coax incorrectly grounded? ZANG. Over and over again.
I'd see it all the time when I was a kid back in the BBS days: The phone line was grounded improperly, and computer was the only thing that connected to both electricity and the telephone line. Some folks would go through several modems over the course of a summer, which was very expensive -- while most people had no problems at all. Next-door neighbors would have completely different failure rates.
Structures with correct grounding tend to do very well at avoiding these issues, and I've fixed these conditions in subsequent years more times than I can count.
(A coworker installed a phone system at a business once, wherein he made extensive use of Ditek surge suppressors -- on the incoming POTS lines, and on the power inputs. It blew up one day. So he called Ditek to try to get at least the cost of the phone system hardware covered. They asked him to draw up a map of how the building was grounded and send that over, so that's exactly what he did. When they saw his map, they very quickly identified a ground loop and denied the claim.)
"What is the mechanism that increases risk for MOV-sourced fires in this arrangement?"
I wondered the same thing, and failed to find a satisfying explanation.
I can find plenty of reports of MOV fires, especially in situations where there's a persistent over-voltage, e.g. a 120 V site actually having closer to 240 V due to a floating neutral. But I don't see how chained MOVs make that worse in general. This blog post has some nice photos:
No clue about the actual reliability of this[1] article but the mechanism mentioned (new pathways due to changes in crystalline structure due to uneven heating) sounds possible.
The things people often call "transformers blowing up" are usually not transformers blowing up.
Instead, it's usually just overhead wires that are too close or literally touching, often from influences like wind and ice. The electricity arcs between the wires, creating bright blue-white flashes that can be seen from far away, sometimes with instantaneous heat that makes hunks of metal wire evaporate explosively. It can be violent and loud, and repetitious as different parts of even a single run fail.
Transformers can certainly blow up, but that's less common. They're (generally) filled with oil for cooling purposes, and they're massive things that tend to take time to get hot. A failed transformer can produce arcing and blue-white light, but if things are that hot then the oil is also ready to burn.
And when the oil burns it isn't blue-white -- it burns with about the same yellow-orange color we saw the last time we accidentally flambéed dinner on the kitchen stove, or a Hollywood fireball.
A bright flash without a fire is probably not a transformer.
Haha, I hear you. But yes, it really is transformers blowing up sometimes. Sometimes it really is just branches blowing up the line, sure.
A branch hitting a wire, happenes all the time here too. Lots of trees in this community. The video of a transformer you shared: that's not the transformer I'm talking about. That's at a transformer station.
And yes, I know it's transformers and not just wires (but also wires do happen definitely) coz I do walk the neighborhood regularly and I can tell when a transformer is new vs. old up there. Ours is old. The ones a few streets over sometimes are very new and I see the Hydro trucks go by the next day(s) to make them new ;)
Again, like seventeen times knock on wood but the ones next to us have not actually blown up. But three streets over, seen the new ones. Literally last weekend, we had an ice storm come through and while no blowouts we could see or hear, the outage map showed plenty of failure.
Residental-scale transformers can and do explode. Shorts happen not-infrequently with freezing rain and ice storms especially causing issues - the internal oil gets displaced by the water, and the dirty water causes an internal short. It wipes out power to a few blocks here when it happens, but we get an outage due to it every year or two.
But when the wind is whipping along on a warm day and there are bright flashes and audible bangs, that's (usually!) not signs of transformers blowing up... even though the popular vernacular often erroneously describes it that way.
It happens. The power company was very unhappy with my boss for destroying one of their transformers. The thing is while circuit breakers react very quickly to extreme overcurrent situations (shorts) they're much slower to react to loads which are only a bit over the limit, and if short enough won't react at all. Very common with heavy motors.
And that's exactly what the problem was--we had a whole bunch of really heavy motors. Getting ready to start for the day you flip on the switches and the big machines start to spin. The transformer on the pole was rated higher than the main breaker for the plant--but the transformer apparently was more sensitive to the temporary loads. Once the problem was identified it was resolved by staging it, instead of flipping them all on they were flipped on over 5 minutes.
Job supply trends towards zero. The ultimate logical conclusion of this train of thought is there is no point in keeping the lower classes alive. Why do we need 15 billion humans if they do nothing but burden you with their maintenance costs? Let them die so that the quadrillionaires can enjoy the Earth with their perfect AI workforces catering to their every need.
The future is bleak. If this is the sort of dystopia I can look forward to, then I would rather have AI simply wipe out humanity as a whole.
In Azimov's Robot series the society that chose to live with robots gradually destructed itself by just living longer and not having so many children. The other part of humanity that avoided robots flourished (not without suffering). But that all required new planets for settlement (I am looking at you Elon).
Trying not to spoil a 40+ year old story, but Asimov eventually retconned that the flourishing of humanity was driven by a benevolent AI behind the curtain.
“Demographic and labor market trends in the U.S. point to an ominous scenario. The nation potentially faces a shortfall of millions of workers in the decade to come — especially in the critical health care sector — due to a projected reduction in workforce participation.”
The supply of jobs exceeds the supply of workers, so yes, you should be able to go and get another job.
It would require several breakthroughs in robotics and AI to automate a nurse's job. And then it would still be unlikely that this kind of automation is saving costs.
For a company the costs of raising and educating humans are only a fraction of their taxes, which they might mostly avoid anyway. The costs of employing a nurse (robotic or human) for a year are much more relevant. And there I am skeptical current robotics can hold a candle to (relative) cheap human labor.
The Nordic model does a great job of providing a poor-raising floor (which also launches entrepreneurs at a higher success rate than in the US). And Norway in particular seems to have figured out how to take commons resources and turn them into common wealth while industry retains profit incentives.
No one is “eviscerated.”
And it’s disingenuous to use that term for any proposal that has even the slightest public traction in the US. The most extreme proposals require single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy.
No one is talking about eviscerating the wealthy. Yet. But if we pretend the only options are (a) unencumbered hyperwealth with attendant hyper income inequality and (b) eviscerating the wealthy for long enough, it’s more likely some people will eventually embrace the latter.
And this is particularly relevant for the age of LLMs. None of them approach intelligence with reliance on a huge data commons (and likely even data that isn’t intended for the commons) they’re an enterprise with a natural arrow from the commons to the common wealth, if we can remember a culture that sustains it.
Maybe you should choose your words more carefully, Walter Bright. To eviscerate means to disembowel. Nobody is pushing to physically hurt the rich. But people are upset that their standards of living are declining while every opportunity to give more money to the rich is executed.
Bernie Sanders asked for taxing the rich and the corporations. Taxing someone does not mean disembowel.
I know what the word means, and I am sure you understand it is not meant to be taken literally.
For example, do you remember when AOC proudly wore a dress with the words "Eat the rich" emblazoned on it? Nobody accused her of suggesting cannibalism.
Bernie Sanders has frequently stated that billionaires should not exist. He used to excoriate millionaires, until he became one himself.
The "Nordic model" refers to the socioeconomics common in Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden), not just to Norway.
It's about how you approach commons and common wealth. Any commons will do. It does not rely on oil resources per se.
Let's say for the sake of argument it does depend on oil wealth, though.
The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does (>200 billion barrels vs ~7 billion). It has already produced at least 200billion barrels since the 1850s. What if the US had treated the wealth from past oil production the way Norway has? What if it treated the next 200 billion that way?
And oil is only one of many commons resources to choose from.
> See Bernie Sanders!
Yes, I addressed Sanders proposal in my earlier comment: "single digit taxes on hyperwealth which might not have impact beyond stabilizing it and certainly wouldn’t make anyone not-wealthy."
A single digit wealth tax is unlikely to fully offset even conventional yearly returns, hence the "might not have impact beyond stabilizing" the wealth of those subject to it.
Even if we assume no yearly returns though -- simply a 5% bite out of net worth -- a wealth tax will not make anyone in that economic strata unwealthy (there's a billions-floor beneath which it wouldn't apply, leaving the worst case still radically prosperous).
There's no reasonable basis to characterize that as "evisceration."
But repeating loaded terms like that as part of an ideological rosary is a common religious and rhetorical strategy.
> Also, if you die in Washington State, your estate is taxed at 75% (40% federal, 35% state).
My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.
Having dynastic wealth flows limited over a few million dollars is also not reasonably described as "evisceration" (especially with all the other vehicles for transferring wealth).
May as well complain to God that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.
> The US currently has something like 30x the proven oil reserves that Norway does
And 60x the population. And defends the world with defense expenditures.
> simply a 5% bite out of net worth
Once that door is open, there will be no end to it. Washington state enacted a 7% capital gains tax, and the next year raised it to 9.9%. Now they're close to enacting a 9.9% income tax.
> My understanding is that estate taxes generally have thresholds that have to be met before they kick in. Federal threshold is on the order of 10million, WA is 3 million.
If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:
35% of $997,000,000 + 40% of $990,000,000 = 74.5% effective tax rate.
> Sanders
said many times that billionaires should not exist
> that you can't take it with you as that you might have to loosen your grasp at death to render unto caeser.
You could take all the money from billionaires and it won't raise the general standard of living. You will also never have companies like SpaceX.
$100 million. He's also founded many other companies. Jeff Bezos has invested an estimated $10 billion to over $14.6 billion into Blue Origin as of early 2025.
OK, let's assume that oil is the only relevant resource, and population is the other relevant factor, and there's no efficiencies of scale or exceptional American ingenuity that can be discovered. 30x the resources combined with 60 times the population would mean we should be able to provide at least half the floor that Norway does, right?
Does that mean if we discover another resource the US has, or efficiencies of scale, or an exceptionally ingenious solution, we can revise that number up?
What if we'd behaved differently in the past when our oil to population ratio was similar to Norway's (or better)? And when's the 2nd best time to start?
Or is this more of a shrug we're nothing compared to those fortunate Scandinavians and that's why we just can't have nice things that they have no matter how nice it would be to have those things, stiff upper lip chaps, greatest country in the world situation?
> And defends the world with defense expenditures.
This is the "I have to wash my hair that night" of excuses -- plausibly true at some level yet studiedly ignoring such a wide latitude of optionality involved that it's clearly covering a refusal.
> Once that door is open, there will be no end to it.
Slippery slope fallacy. Tax rates move, but not monotonically.
For average US households effective income tax rates are more or less flat for the last generation or three. For high eaners? To say that the trend is downward doesn't cover it, it's a dramatic drop compared to midcentury era rates.
Wealth taxes in the countries that have them don't seem to demand an ever larger share.
If your strongest example is washington state a capital gains tax rate change within the same order of magnitude (that's still well below average effective income tax rates) you don't have much of a case.
Lots of unevisceratedly wealthy people live in states where the highest income tax bracket has rates over 10%. I'm sure the people with over a million a year in income will remain prosperous.
> If your estate is $1 billion, your estate tax will be:
Also you'll be dead and as such won't have continued control over any of your previous assets. Hence the earlier comment to the effect that one may as well complain to God about having to loosen ones grasp on them at death as rail against rendering unto caeser.
The natural "tax rate" on assets at death is 100%. Any smaller number than that is an affordance from the cooperation of society.
> said many times that billionaires should not exist
Perhaps he's right and it's hard to draw a solid straight line between that scale of personal profit and input. Perhaps he's wrong.
Still, as discussed, the most extreme concrete policy that Sanders has proposed is a wealth tax of 5%, and we've discussed why the dynamics of that are not existential threats to the wealth of anyone, much less worthy of the term "evisceration."
No one is proposing taking all the money from even the billionares. Most likely outcome of a 5% tax rate is stabilization.
> it won't raise the general standard of living.
And yet other societies have managed to produce better general standards of living (and higher rates of entrepreneurial success) via various policies including some different tax rates.
> You will also never have companies like SpaceX.
Companies exist to broadly source capital to bring to bear on an enterprise. So it stands to reason that companies like Space X will exist whether the capital comes from a wide pool of investors whose upside is limited somewhere below hyperwealth, or a contribution from a narrower set of investors with a higher concentration, at least as long as there's a credible upside.
That's an interesting question. And to the extent that we're shifting discussion from "taxes are terrible mistreatment of the hyperwealthy" to "taxes might make national business/economic development less robust", OK.
Worth noting that GDP per capita of Norway and Iceland are pretty close to the US:
Denmark's on the same order and Sweden isn't too far behind (and still has a handful of their own recognized global successes).
Using general stats like that helps avoid sharpshooter fallacies that could be hazards in picking a list of high profile successes.
Still, let's talk about those successes. What are the conditions that gave rise to SpaceX, Amazon, Google, and Walmart? Whatever they are, none of their stories seems path-dependent anyone's personal billions. SpaceX owes as much or more to government decisions to privately source launch capability (not to mention path dependence on public programs supporting a certain related company). Google was famously founded by not particularly wealthy PhD students with initial capital well under a million dollars. Walmart wasn't founded with millions let alone billions. Bezos was probably the wealthiest founder when it comes to your list -- maybe had a six figure net worth, possibly seven, certainly good networks for raising capital -- but the bootstrapping capital that went into it didn't require anyone to be a billionaire.
Whatever the US does right as far as positive business environment goes, it doesn't require personal billions, so it's pretty unlikely to stop with additional taxes on billionaire concentrations of wealth. Taxes which, again, at the level of any proposed rate, would most likely not even un-billionaire anyone.
Soviet people’s standard of living was way below Western standards. Stalin took Russia out of the Middle Ages and into the w0th century at the cost of millions and millions of Russian luves.
yeah the shine in the top left of the rectangle was what led me to think it was a mirror, which from my experience would have been really strange for the types of nerds that would work in windowless rooms back in those days.
The black cable underneath looked like the shadow of an oval frame
Called the fire department's non-emergency line. Got a bot. The bot sent out someone who said the noise isn't a safety issue, and left.
Called the police department's non-emergency line. Got a bot that told me it's a civil problem and that there's nothing they can do.
Scouted out the fire department and chatted up the fire chief in person while he was walking back in after lunch. He was very concerned about all of this (finally, progress!) and called the management company while we stood there, but his call was answered by a bot that said someone would be out in less than 24 hours to silence the noise again.
Yes oh my god. I'm trying to rent right now and the application has me doing this fucking approveshield bullshit where they request every document you've ever had and direct access to your bank account before they'll approve that I'm not a criminal or liar. Whatever happened to bank statements?! Why does some random company need to know that my closest grocery store is kroger and i went to miniso for my girlfriend birthday, among hundreds of other small details of my life. And they weren't even satisfied with that, i had to send in a picture of my driver's license (standard these days) but the webpage opened up a qr code, to open on my phone which took me to the appstorr to download some other bullshit app to give every single permission and piece of my data to! I JUST WANT AN APARTMENT, I'VE DONE IT DOZENS OF TIMES, WHY ARE YOU TREATING MY LIKE I'M ON THE FBI MOST WANTED!
This is just an artifact of the legal environment in many jurisdictions which makes it almost impossible to build new apartments (supply shortage) plus ridiculous tenant protection laws which make it nearly impossible to evict deadbeats.
You've got to follow incentives. It's almost certainly a code violation, which comes with escalating fines until it's corrected. The local building, zoning, or whoever-enforces-codes authority will be interested in collecting that if they can, and the owner will want to avoid them, so that's where I'd start.
Called legal aid. The bot that answered the phone submitted a complaint to the court and the management company which cited the correct historic documents and demanded compliance with them.
The management company bot responded to the court declaring that they're doing all they're required to do to correct the noise, and concluded with "the issue is not ripe for adjudication" -- whatever that means.
The court's bot agreed and binned the complaint "with prejudice" -- again, whatever that means, and sent me a fine for wasting their time.
Every day, the noise still happens.
And every day, the man from the management company still shows up to silence the noise.
I've come to know him fairly well.
It turns out that his name is William, although everyone calls him Bill. Bill is a nice guy who once studied computer programming, but the best-paying job he ever managed to get was slinging packages for Amazon back when that was still a thing that people did.
Most Thursday nights, if we don't have anything else going on, Bill and I go bowling at the AMF that's not too far down the road. It was his idea. We've been doing this about every week for long enough that I've learned to become a pretty proficient bowler. And while I still enjoy that part, we spend most of our time having a few beers and solving the world's problems.
A few months ago, we started talking about pinsetters and Bill mentioned that he read once that this was once a job that people did manually -- that rather than having a machine at the end of the alley, there were people behind the wall who would collect the scattered pins and put them back onto the painted dots on the floor. That sounded pretty archaic compared to the machines that I've seen doing this work for my entire life, but it seemed likely enough.
I started thinking about some other things about bowling: These days, we just walk in and our shoes are ready for us by the time we make it up to the front. We pick our own lane and just start bowling. After that, the machine sets the pins, keeps the score, and returns the ball. Pretty normal stuff.
And then, Bill pointed out the other people: There were a couple of small groups of people who were bowling, and one grizzled old fellah nursing what looked like a White Russian at the bar, but that was it. Nobody else was present; nobody actually worked there at all.
How long had it been since I asked for a pair of size 11 shoes, I wondered? When was the last time I talked to a bartender to order another beer? I hadn't paid for a thing using a card, or even carried anything like that with me for what seemed like eons. The self-cleaning bathrooms were certainly a welcome change, but how long ago were those put in and what happened to the person who used to clean them?
Neither of us could pick an exact timeframe for when these things changed. We both agreed that it wasn't important at the time, and that it seemed like a natural-enough progression.
Anyway, it was getting late again. After we put our shoes onto the mat for the sanitizer bot to deal with and started to walk out, the screens by the door told us what our tabs were, debited our accounts, and told us that it would see us next week.
I'm sure that Bill will stop by tomorrow afternoon to push the button and silence the noise from the electrical panel for another 24 hours, just like he always has.
They respond to an imbalance in current flow betwixt line and neutral. What goes out must return; if it doesn't, then switch off.
Ground is not part of the equation at all.
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