Not necessarily for sound, on industrial fans and drives, we can program in skip frequencies to avoid any resonance issues in the system. I’ve never done it for noise reduction. But I do some tweaks for efficiency and power consumption reduction. There’s some wild industrial design stuff out there, and in the end, it’s because it provides something the customer wants. I won’t go into specifics, but you can design the same components the same for multiple manufacturers and do some slightly different things in its construction to give the vibe the OEM wants, or to fix some inherent characteristics in the manufacturers platform. It’s REALLY cool when you think about it. Sorry to be so vague, but I have to be.

Admitted, I haven’t read all the comments. I bought a refurbished M2 Mini to use as a cheap media server last week, and so I can use AirMessage with apple users in my life. The M2 Mini is a step down in every way from my ancient mid 2012 MacBook Pro except heat and efficiency. RAM, gotta pay extra for it. Disk space, gotta pay out the ass for it too, and you can’t even get a Mini with the amount of apace I put in my mid 2012 MBP. (4TB)I want to like it, but it’s SO LIMITING without paying out the ass and getting nickel and dimed for everything. I love macOS, especially compared to the disaster that is windows 10 and 11, but it’s ridiculous and so anti consumer nowadays! Which to be fair, Steve Jobs’ ultimate goal with all their products was to make it this way. Want to backup an iPad and iPhone? Good luck. You run out of space almost immediately with the 256GB of storage. Want to use an external disk for those backups? Use symbolic links and terminal, but you’ll have to manually move them to the Mac if you ever need to restore. I have a 6tb external disk attached to it now, but I’m afraid I’m still gonna be hamstrung somehow. All my photos, time machine backups, and media are on the external for obvious reasons. I was also going to pick up a MacBook Air 15" m3 (with upgrades) from Apple, but I’m really rethinking it right now, macOS or not.

I have been recovering from my 4th COVID infection. I’ve told people, it’s not Pokemon, I’ve NOT gotta catch em all. Seems bad luck, my immune system, or shitty people I work around will continue to give it to me. 🫤

It’s not YouTube that’s the problem. I’ve got the same Gmail account since 2004, and don’t want to loose my Google photos. I’m getting the stuff together to self host them all, but am not there yet.

So I’ve been wondering this for a while. Is there a way for Google to associate my usage of Newpipe or similar to my actual Google account? I hate all the ads, but don’t want to lose all of my Google account stuff. I’ve got a lot invested in it.

For those of you who were confused by Maya, like me, it is the Mayak or Kyshtyn accident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

That being said, I don’t think the nuclear industry of today should be hamstrung by Soviet incompetence and corruption from the 1950s. I mean these guys at this location were running open loop cooling circuits into the lake and river. We know better than this nowadays.

Ditto. At least with gas I’m not paying Alabama Power’s rates.

Thanks, but that doesn’t help those of us who are trying to make the state better.

I can speak a little on this. I am a resident of Alabama in one of the poorer counties, Pickens. Median household income per Wikipedia is $26,254. I’d say that ranks pretty low. 20% of families, and 24% of people here live below the poverty line. I have lived here all my life. Prior to COVID in the US, our only local hospital closed in 2020. It is now a 30-40 minute drive to Tuscaloosa or Columbus MS for emergency care on a good day. There are local clinics, but nothing for OBGYN care or emergency treatment. There was a doctor who came to the local hospital weekly for local appointments prior to the closure.

During my wife’s first pregnancy, care was pretty good even having to drive the 40 minutes to each appointment and waiting in the car. (During COVID, the OB offices would only allow the patient inside).

The second pregnancy my wife miscarried towards the end of the 1st trimester, and we had to wait until the following day to come back for her D&C procedure. She collapsed the following morning at the hospital due to blood loss. Or what I’d call lack of care from Alabama hospitals. Thankfully, this was prior to Alabama’s new silly abortion and pregnancy laws. I can’t imagine how this would’ve been handled then.

Her third (and hopefully final from both of our standpoints) pregnancy went fairly well, but it sure seemed the doctors and quality of care and ability to do things changed between the 1st and 3rd pregnancy. The only thing I can think of is Alabama’s new stupid laws around pregnancy. I’m glad we are both done with having kids.

We aren’t well off, but compared to many here, we are. I can’t imagine it working out well for many of our fellow citizens in Alabama.

And now onto the rural hospitals part. As mentioned above, our local hospital closed just prior to COVID. I am a first responder as a volunteer fireman for the community. With the closure of the local hospital, our local ambulance company (which is coincidentally managed by a company from Tuscaloosa county) has been hard pressed to keep up with emergency demand. They may have 2 trucks on a good day to cover a population of 20,000 people spread over 900 square miles. (2300 km2). It is not unusual for us to wait 40 minutes or longer for an ambulance. Our situation is also not helped by frequent flyers or people that could get there on their own but think going by ambulance gets them in and out faster. (it’s a really common misconception.)

Prior to the local hospital closure, we’d work a code all the way to the hospital in the back of an ambulance with the paramedics. Nowadays, the ambulance arrives, we state how long we’ve been doing CPR, the ambulance crew observes, sometimes assists, and watches, gets an ECG reading, calls the doctor on duty at one of the ERs, and if there’s no good news, we stop there and tell the family we’ve done all we can. It FUCKING SUCKS. At least prior to the closure, they had that hope as we loaded them into the ambulance and left with them that maybe they’d make it. Nowadays, you’re there for all of it. The initial hope, the shock, the crushing realization. It takes a toll on all of us. Volunteers are down, and I can’t help but think the stresses of all this are a major part of it.

And the final kick in the dick for all of this is remember where I said our local ambulance service is managed out of Tuscaloosa? Tuscaloosa fines them if they don’t have an ambulance available. Our county has no such stipulation. So if their county’s ambulances are tied up, ours get pulled over there, and we are left with nothing and no local care.

There has been a major push by local mayors to get funding to open the hospital ER back up and use the hospital part as a mental health unit for teens from across the state. We thought a good deal had been reached, but our own state senator out of Tuscaloosa shot it down and spent the money elsewhere. I’ll remember that next time I vote, and I’ve been telling everyone that I see in the community to remember it also. The mayors even got a group together to go to the state capital and make their case only to be told that they thought they were speaking to the wrong committee about it. So we were told to wait until 2024 and see what happens. I suspect nothing will change in this dump, and people will continue to suffer. That’s what I expect.

Sorry for the long rant, this is something I’m directly involved with, and rather passionate about. Thanks for reading this far if you have.

Haven’t read the article yet, but the quote irks me. I live in a home built in 1920 by a rural “house doctor” with a barn and stalls and all that jazz. Electric may be the future, but gas cars will still be around a while. The same way horses didn’t immediately disappear from rural areas when cars became affordable.