I loved the ending of Hero of Ages. There’s a novella to read partway through the second age that does some beautiful stuff around it. The second age is a very different style, but it is a lot of fun. You never regret that extra shake…

I just finished the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin. The first book is from the sixties and the final short from 2018, so it is a fascinating trip through the maturation of Fantasy. The first three books are firmly young-adult, while the last three stick with the characters as adults. The whole series ends with a very short story the author wrote to be published after her death. It’s a wonderful look at the mind of an old person at the end of their story.

Recent publications include afterwords written in 2012 which give a lot of context and interesting insights into how she wrote stories.

A business buys a product and pays a sales tax to the supplier, and this is deductable. It also sell the same product with a markup, and collects a higher sales tax from he consumer.

Usually in the US items purchased for resale are tax-exempt. A restaurant, for example, would have a resale certificate on file with their suppliers. Any food, beverage, and disposables they get would have no taxes since they are expected to sell those to a consumer. Cleaning supplies, however, are outside the bounds of their resale cert, so they would pay sales tax on those items.

Also, sales tax is not remitted to the government instantly in the US. I think it’s done quarterly, but I’m not exposed as much to that side of it.

Labeling it the beginning of winter is a cultural thing.

Half of these are a single recall from a farm that took two days for a major packer to pack. Anybody that used cucumbers from that packer that might have been packed in those two days then has to issue their own recall.

Rakuten is up front about it. They force their affiliate links, then pay you part of their cut.

Honey forces their affiliate links in exchange for maybe finding you a discount code.

They are small cylinders, so without gloves lots of half prints will be left. Fingerprints are so similar that that is unlikely to be usable to find the loader without a ton of effort. It is very useful to tie a suspect to the weapon after they have been found through other means, however.

A smart criminal should always wear gloves when interacting with anything that may be collected as evidence.

If you haven’t, check out Combined Arms. It is an OpenRA mod that brings in a lot of units and design from RA2, Generals, and C&C3.

Yeah… That reads as them being ordered to guard the convoys, not bomb them at a whim.

Isn’t that just a normal North America plug? Most lawn equipment was set up to use standard extension cords so that cables didn’t have to be unique.

The dev stated that it mostly exists for more performance-limited applications like mobile.

Expanse does too, though it isn’t common in that world.

Similarly, VLC names their releases after Discworld characters. It’s a fun way to make major versions feel like more than just a number increment.

It gets called that everywhere. Most people never need to know the actual specs for a screw, so language diverges from the classification system.

I usually keep the corrections to myself, but when somebody else is already correcting someone and they say the wrong thing too it becomes hard.

Flathead is a description of the head profile, like panhead. Slotted is the screwdriver type that is just a single slot.

I can’t stress how much Teams and Zoom have disrupted traditional voice and collaboration, which was a cash cow for Cisco.

Yep. The company I work for stripped out all the Cisco desk phones last week. All the phone numbers just map to Teams now.

Cheaper, less hardware to troubleshoot, and better suited to hybrid work.

People still sculpt. Go look up Bobby Fingers on YouTube to get an idea of what sculpting looks like.

There are a variety of clays. From what I hear, most sculptors use some form of air-dry, not firing clay like pottery would use.

Nobody ever sculpted in marble. You would sculpt in clay, make a plaster mold, fine-tune the design, then meticulously transfer it to marble.

Banks like to think that branch employees (bank tellers) are sales people. Most of them give ‘goals’ to each employee requiring them to open a certain number of new accounts, land a certain number of loans, etc each week/month. It isn’t ethical since the only people you can really sell on those services are the ones who should least get them. Anyone who actually wants/needs the services will come to you.

Wells Fargo differed from the rest of the industry by setting completely impossible goals, not just unethical ones. This led to them developing a culture where signing people up for services they didn’t agree to became commonplace.

The regulatory agency is pretty large, but it’s headed by a 5-member commission.

Boeing doesn’t make engines.

Also, this is a nine-year-old plane. It has had at least one total tear down by Southwest.

Have you ever heard big cats? They sound like little cats but… deeper. I feel like dinosaurs would sound like birds with similar deepening, depending on the size of the dino.