Most dealerships, surprisingly, have a willingly captive audience.
I live in a moderately sized city where "small town" attitude runs rampant, and the prevailing attitude here is that it's one's civic duty to shop locally - even if that means getting screwed over. There's a dealership in a neighboring city that advertises along my commute with billboards to the effect of "drive 50 miles, save thousands" but many locals are reluctant to travel even to the next county.
So, although it's widely known that most of our local dealerships are extremely shady, the locals don't care. I even once had a salesman, when I said that I had found a better price across the state, reply that why would I drive three hours away instead of supporting a local business... you know what, taking my business elsewhere is exactly what I'm going to do.
If you're willing to travel, you can actually find some reputable, honest dealerships out there. We use USAA's car buying service to shop for the best price, and some dealerships are surprisingly much more willing to work with you if they know that you're not geographically limited. If I don't like what I'm hearing over the phone, I can hang up and you've lost any chance of a sale. Last time we bought a car, we drove all the way to South Carolina, and saved several thousand dollars. Before that, we drove to Ohio. Each time did cost us a weekend, but we got two decent road trips out of it... and one manager actually walked in after we had closed the sale and handed us an envelope with $300 cash, for travel expenses, to thank us for driving out of state to give them business.
Many ATMs are in locations that don't have many eyes watching them for long periods of time. If you want to tinker with an ATM, in theory you could work in the middle of the night and spend minutes or hours without anyone getting suspicious. Sure, you might be on camera, but those are rarely monitored. Try tinkering with a slot machine or exhibiting any other suspicious behavior on a casino floor and employees are likely to notice you within moments and intercept you.
No, the signature is not a form of verification, so there's nothing to "defeat". If the customer never inputs the correct pin, ultimately the transaction will be declined. No cashier is going to put up with you trying 10,000 possible combinations until you brute force the right one.
Signatures are a holdover from the old days, and serve no more than to give the retailer a way to prove that both the card and a person were present at the time of sale (say, if a transaction were disputed). Note I said a person and not necessarily an authorized person; back in the signature days the burden of proof was on the retailer to determine that the person using the card was actually the authorized user, but this was rarely done in practice. basically, a signature was proof that a purchase was not a "card not present" transaction.
Case in point, many years ago I was at a register and had swiped my card a second before noticing that an item had been rung up wrong (double charged), so I asked if I could just refuse to sign the electronic pad and "decline" the transaction. The answer from a manager was no, the lack of a signature would make no difference as the transaction happened automatically as soon as the card was read.
I love driving (I'm the type who takes 3,000 mile road trips for fun on long weekends) and I also welcome driverless cars.
The way technology is progressing, it's not going to be an "all or nothing" deal where a car is either driverless, or it isn't. Case in point, last week I rented an SUV that was augmented with all sorts of driver assist features: lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, an audible alarm that would sound if the car ahead started braking or an object crossed within the path of travel, and more. Just like airbags in the 90's, or backup cameras in the last decade, the features that enable driverless operation will find their way down into economy cars as safety features.
When I'm not cruising around the mountains, usually I DO just want to get to my destination. On my morning commute, I'd love to hand over control to the car and be free to do something else with my time. And if more driverless vehicles mean that I'm statistically safer from distracted idiot drivers, or that I save a couple minutes because I don't miss a light while the person in front of me is on their phone, or that traffic flow can be optimized to reduce gridlock, I am all for that.
GP wasn't talking about the flashy sliding stuff, but about the content layout. Things you'll still see on Amazon's website, that many other websites have eliminated in favor of "streamlining" the "user experience":
- No hamburger menus. They still dare to hide their menus behind descriptive words.
- Long lists actually have page numbers at the bottom, instead of infinitely scrolling.
- Everything's black text on white, with blue links, and prices in dark red. Lots of bold text everywhere. Virtually no pale thin fonts on pastel backgrounds.
- Not one, but TWO site maps at the bottom of the page!
- Minimal white space. By modern "UX" design, most pages are actually considered cluttered. Not quite "Yahoo 1996" cluttered, but still very information dense.
And you know what? It works. I can usually get from where I am to where I want to be with no more than a couple clicks, and I spend longer on each page because there's so much info to digest. That means I'm more likely to notice all the other "impulse buy" items on the sidebar, which is probably their goal.
But honestly a bicycle is perfectly fine. I live in an urban center and a bicycle that can reach up to 15 MPH is perfectly fine for riding two miles to work, or half a mile to the store, and it even has a basket that can hold two bags of groceries or a small backpack. I don't understand why anyone would need a car, or why we should build roads to accommodate them.
My point is, everybody's usage case is different and most of us aren't okay with something being just barely good enough.
It all comes down to personal preference. Taller individuals may want an aisle seat for the legroom, I prefer a window because I have something to lean against and (try to) sleep, and I like to look out the window to see what's below. But if I'm traveling with my toddler I want an aisle and middle seat, so that we can get up with minimal disruption for needed potty breaks. Otherwise, I'm okay to stay put until my seatmates stand up, and I don't like the annoyance of being bumped, jostled, and prodded by passengers and service carts trying to negotiate the aisle.
I've flown on planes of all sizes, from 747's to 4-seat Cessnas, and I much prefer the medium sized, single aisle planes over the larger ones - think the A-320 or 737. There's much less hassle trying to board/deplane, shorter lines at customs, service doesn't take as long, and there's usually less of a wait for the lavatories. Personally I'm completely averse to the middle row seating, especially on planes like the 767 or the (thankfully now defunct) DC-10 with it's horrible 5-across middle row, where the high proportion of middle seats meant that you were more likely to be stuck without the convenience of either an aisle or a window.
I was able to book a round trip to South Korea on one of Delta's 747's last month, on what ended up being the final overseas journey for that particular airplane. I didn't realize this until the flight crew informed us as we arrived back at Detroit, and as I confirmed later the plane then sat for a few more weeks before making the trip to the Pinal boneyard just before Christmas. What made the farewell especially sad was...
- There was virtually no fanfare. The flight crew and a few of us passengers lingered several minutes for photos before we deplaned, but there was nothing to mark the occasion.
- The aircraft was really showing its age. Little things throughout the passenger cabin like a nonworking lavatory (sealed off by duct tape), broken headphone jacks, flaky call buttons, heavily patched floor panels, and stuck windowshades were frequent reminders that our plane was nearing its end of service. - When we arrived back in Detriot, the entire remaining Delta 747 fleet (5 aircraft) was present at the airfield. Two of the planes would be in service for another week, but our pilot told me that three of them were waiting for the farewell tour or were being sent directly to Pinal.
- The plane was packed out with flight enthusiasts who, like myself, jumped on the chance to travel in a 747 for what may likely be the last time. It wasn't difficult for us to find each other, and there were dozens of us.
Quite the opposite, actually. The tendency is for people to blindly accept even the most vague or ambiguous evidence when it supports the conclusion that we went it to, and to treat with extreme skepticism any evidence that supports a conclusion we don't want to be true.
For example, look at "creation science". A significant number of evangelical conservatives who treat climate change with skepticism are perfectly willing to unquestionably accept conclusions about the origins of canyons and other geological features that are based on extremely dubious methods of inquiry.
I suspect that virtually all of the clicks on video ads are of the "trying to figure out where to click to make this crap go away" variety rather than "hmm, interesting ad, I'll forego the video I was about to watch so I can find out more about the product."
TFA does a better job than the summary at explaining, but yes, your observation is consistent. Wetter summers mean more vegetation growth, but it's the weather during a few critical weeks in late fall that determine how severe the fires will be.
It's the small stuff (leaves, brush, and weeds) that burns fast, hot, and explosively given the right conditions. In the fall, when the deciduous species lose their leaves, a wet December means that most of this vegetation falls to the ground and begins to decompose, rendering it more dense and less flammable. When you have a combination of dry weather, warm temperatures, and high wind, combined with ignition (historically caused by lightning, but usually by people these days), leaves tend to stay on the trees longer, or fall to the ground without decomposing, and become perfect fuel.
So yes, you're correct that when this stuff dries out, it becomes a hazard.
For example, last fall was a historically notable fire season in the southern Appalachians. Many parts of the mountains in NC/TN/GA had little to no measurable rainfall for a couple months, so the leaves simply dried up and stayed on the trees rather than changing color and falling to the ground. The deadly fires that swept through Gatlinburg, Tennessee became "canopy" fires - an event more common in California but virtually unheard of in eastern forests. Even one good rainstorm could, in theory, have been sufficient to knock enough leaves off of the trees and compress the leaf litter on the forest floor to render it slightly less flammable.
Over the last few decades, advertising by tobacco companies has been significantly curtailed (source). Have you ever noticed that these days you never see a cigarette ad on TV, at a sporting event, or on a billboard? Just about the only place you're likely to see tobacco advertised is in the window of a convenience store that sells them, and even those usually just feature nothing more than a brand logo and the price.
The page at the first link was updated with a link to their data, complete with a list of all the offending sites that are ranked in the top 10,000 by Alexa.
As one of the links even mentions, Facebook was caught doing the same with status updates (recording everything you type, even if you delete it before posting) back in 2013. What's news here is the extent to which websites are doing this these days.
For years now I've been operating under the assumption that websites collect as much data on user interaction as possible, even including things like what links you mouse over (not necessarily click on), how long you spend reading content before moving on, and how long the cursor remains on different parts of the page. This is yet one more reason why I never browse without NoScript and uBlock Origin. Fortunately, as reported in the first link:
Does tracking protection help?
Two commonly used ad-blocking lists EasyList and EasyPrivacy do not block FullStory, Smartlook, or UserReplay scripts. EasyPrivacy has filter rules that block Yandex, Hotjar, ClickTale and SessionCam.
Now that this practice is getting a little more attention, here's hoping that more of these sites will be added to popular blocklists.
I have a nervous habit of idly swirling the mouse around while I read, and I've long suspected that sites were logging these movements. So, it's a habit that I've never tried to break, but rather I've been hoping that by passing the cursor over all sorts of page elements hundreds of times in the course of a few minutes, I'm screwing with their data collection somehow.
Remember back in the early 2000's, when you'd occasionally come across a website that was entirely contained within Flash? Remember how much we all despised those?
Well, we're basically back to that point with Javascript. When I want to read a few paragraphs of text with maybe a picture or two, why should I download 2+ MB of javascript libraries just so that the images can fade in from the background as I scroll down, or drift across the page Ken Burns style as I read?
With more and more sites these days, you get nothing unless you enable javascript. Just like in the days when Flash was abused, I now have to waste precious bandwidth and put myself at a security risk just so that some designer can try to impress me with their presentation.
One major difference I've seen with the 240v US style plugs is that they are often hidden behind the large appliances that they serve, so that you have to physically move your oven or dryer out of the way to even unplug them. Now, that's just personal observation, and might not be true in every case, and I have no idea whether that is by design or even required by code. They also require quite a bit more effort to unplug than the standard 120v plug, so much that I can't reasonably see my toddler unplugging one.
Putting on my cynical hat here... although the laws vary by state, it looks really bad if you as an employer were to fire employees for reasons like "low performance" and then neglect to attempt to fill those positions. The former employees would then have a really strong case for unemployment benefits (which they might not otherwise be entitled to if fired with cause, but again, that varies by location), or maybe even wrongful termination if they can make a convincing case that their former employer used bogus reasons to avoid calling the terminations "layoffs."
But, there's nothing that says you (the employer) actually have to fill those openings... just leave them open, interview someone every once in a while to put up appearances, and you can then make a claim like "well, we've been interviewing, but haven't been unable to find any good candidates" without ever actually filling the position that you want to cut.
Not only that, but in the mind of a conspiracy theorist, any attempts to downplay or suppress their theory simply validate it. What was just a kooky idea in a Youtube video becomes "THE CONSPIRACY THAT EVEN YOUTUBE IS TRYING TO HIDE!!!"
I personally know several people who have been swept up in the recent "9/11 was an inside job" craze (it's 2017 - why the hell is that even still a thing?) and it's impossible to have a rational conversation with them about it... because if you don't completely buy in or try to use things like logic and facts to explain how ridiculous they sound, they accuse you of having the wool pulled over your eyes and being manipulated by the mainstream media or the government.
It's not brightness that's a factor, but the fact that wavelengths of light in the UV spectrum cause damage to cells. The amount of UV radiation given off by the sun is greater than what one would be exposed to while welding, even if the intensity of light in the visible range is greater.
So, the issue with cheap eclipse glasses is that they block most of the visible spectrum, but don't block an appropriate amount of UV, so those wavelengths travel right past your dilated pupils and strike the retina while you stare. Think of what happens when you get a sunburn - UV radiation damages cells in your skin - and imagine the same thing happening to the inside of your eyes.
Yes, it's the same in the US, too. I have an old iPhone that is no longer on a plan, which I use as a music player but it cannot send/receive data or make calls. However, in an emergency, it could be used to call 911 even from the lock screen.
If I want HBO's content, I need to pay an expensive cable subscription, I ain't doing that.
Not if you live in the US. We don't have a cable subscription, and sprung for the free trial of HBO Go last year (I think you get 30 days before you're charged?) so that we could catch up on the whole series without having to mess with torrents. Our original plan was to cancel the trial before we had to pay, but in the end we decided to pay for one month out of principal - $15 to binge watch six seasons was well worth it to us.
The aurora are not always visible all around the globe at the same latitude; they often appear brighter in one hemisphere and not the other at a given time. There's a good visualization here: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/produ...
So, it could very well be that Fairbanks could get a very good show one night (assuming it's not mid summer and it's dark enough) while Iceland might not see anything, even though they are both roughly at the same latitude.
Also, the aurora typically aren't as intense right at the poles, but are often most intense at less extreme latitudes around 60 degrees. So it's not unheard of for the aurora to be very impressive in Alberta, while not even being visible in the north part of the Yukon.
Slashdot Mirror
Most dealerships, surprisingly, have a willingly captive audience.
I live in a moderately sized city where "small town" attitude runs rampant, and the prevailing attitude here is that it's one's civic duty to shop locally - even if that means getting screwed over. There's a dealership in a neighboring city that advertises along my commute with billboards to the effect of "drive 50 miles, save thousands" but many locals are reluctant to travel even to the next county.
So, although it's widely known that most of our local dealerships are extremely shady, the locals don't care. I even once had a salesman, when I said that I had found a better price across the state, reply that why would I drive three hours away instead of supporting a local business... you know what, taking my business elsewhere is exactly what I'm going to do.
If you're willing to travel, you can actually find some reputable, honest dealerships out there. We use USAA's car buying service to shop for the best price, and some dealerships are surprisingly much more willing to work with you if they know that you're not geographically limited. If I don't like what I'm hearing over the phone, I can hang up and you've lost any chance of a sale. Last time we bought a car, we drove all the way to South Carolina, and saved several thousand dollars. Before that, we drove to Ohio. Each time did cost us a weekend, but we got two decent road trips out of it... and one manager actually walked in after we had closed the sale and handed us an envelope with $300 cash, for travel expenses, to thank us for driving out of state to give them business.
Many ATMs are in locations that don't have many eyes watching them for long periods of time. If you want to tinker with an ATM, in theory you could work in the middle of the night and spend minutes or hours without anyone getting suspicious. Sure, you might be on camera, but those are rarely monitored. Try tinkering with a slot machine or exhibiting any other suspicious behavior on a casino floor and employees are likely to notice you within moments and intercept you.
No, the signature is not a form of verification, so there's nothing to "defeat". If the customer never inputs the correct pin, ultimately the transaction will be declined. No cashier is going to put up with you trying 10,000 possible combinations until you brute force the right one.
Signatures are a holdover from the old days, and serve no more than to give the retailer a way to prove that both the card and a person were present at the time of sale (say, if a transaction were disputed). Note I said a person and not necessarily an authorized person; back in the signature days the burden of proof was on the retailer to determine that the person using the card was actually the authorized user, but this was rarely done in practice. basically, a signature was proof that a purchase was not a "card not present" transaction.
Case in point, many years ago I was at a register and had swiped my card a second before noticing that an item had been rung up wrong (double charged), so I asked if I could just refuse to sign the electronic pad and "decline" the transaction. The answer from a manager was no, the lack of a signature would make no difference as the transaction happened automatically as soon as the card was read.
I love driving (I'm the type who takes 3,000 mile road trips for fun on long weekends) and I also welcome driverless cars.
The way technology is progressing, it's not going to be an "all or nothing" deal where a car is either driverless, or it isn't. Case in point, last week I rented an SUV that was augmented with all sorts of driver assist features: lane departure warning, adaptive cruise control, an audible alarm that would sound if the car ahead started braking or an object crossed within the path of travel, and more. Just like airbags in the 90's, or backup cameras in the last decade, the features that enable driverless operation will find their way down into economy cars as safety features.
When I'm not cruising around the mountains, usually I DO just want to get to my destination. On my morning commute, I'd love to hand over control to the car and be free to do something else with my time. And if more driverless vehicles mean that I'm statistically safer from distracted idiot drivers, or that I save a couple minutes because I don't miss a light while the person in front of me is on their phone, or that traffic flow can be optimized to reduce gridlock, I am all for that.
GP wasn't talking about the flashy sliding stuff, but about the content layout. Things you'll still see on Amazon's website, that many other websites have eliminated in favor of "streamlining" the "user experience":
- No hamburger menus. They still dare to hide their menus behind descriptive words.
- Long lists actually have page numbers at the bottom, instead of infinitely scrolling.
- Everything's black text on white, with blue links, and prices in dark red. Lots of bold text everywhere. Virtually no pale thin fonts on pastel backgrounds.
- Not one, but TWO site maps at the bottom of the page!
- Minimal white space. By modern "UX" design, most pages are actually considered cluttered. Not quite "Yahoo 1996" cluttered, but still very information dense.
And you know what? It works. I can usually get from where I am to where I want to be with no more than a couple clicks, and I spend longer on each page because there's so much info to digest. That means I'm more likely to notice all the other "impulse buy" items on the sidebar, which is probably their goal.
...have a hardcoded backdoor, meaning anyone can access them...
Firmware 2.30.172 reportedly fixes the bug...
I don't think that word means what the author thinks it means.
But honestly a bicycle is perfectly fine. I live in an urban center and a bicycle that can reach up to 15 MPH is perfectly fine for riding two miles to work, or half a mile to the store, and it even has a basket that can hold two bags of groceries or a small backpack. I don't understand why anyone would need a car, or why we should build roads to accommodate them.
My point is, everybody's usage case is different and most of us aren't okay with something being just barely good enough.
It all comes down to personal preference. Taller individuals may want an aisle seat for the legroom, I prefer a window because I have something to lean against and (try to) sleep, and I like to look out the window to see what's below. But if I'm traveling with my toddler I want an aisle and middle seat, so that we can get up with minimal disruption for needed potty breaks. Otherwise, I'm okay to stay put until my seatmates stand up, and I don't like the annoyance of being bumped, jostled, and prodded by passengers and service carts trying to negotiate the aisle.
I've flown on planes of all sizes, from 747's to 4-seat Cessnas, and I much prefer the medium sized, single aisle planes over the larger ones - think the A-320 or 737. There's much less hassle trying to board/deplane, shorter lines at customs, service doesn't take as long, and there's usually less of a wait for the lavatories. Personally I'm completely averse to the middle row seating, especially on planes like the 767 or the (thankfully now defunct) DC-10 with it's horrible 5-across middle row, where the high proportion of middle seats meant that you were more likely to be stuck without the convenience of either an aisle or a window.
I was able to book a round trip to South Korea on one of Delta's 747's last month, on what ended up being the final overseas journey for that particular airplane. I didn't realize this until the flight crew informed us as we arrived back at Detroit, and as I confirmed later the plane then sat for a few more weeks before making the trip to the Pinal boneyard just before Christmas. What made the farewell especially sad was...
- There was virtually no fanfare. The flight crew and a few of us passengers lingered several minutes for photos before we deplaned, but there was nothing to mark the occasion.
- The aircraft was really showing its age. Little things throughout the passenger cabin like a nonworking lavatory (sealed off by duct tape), broken headphone jacks, flaky call buttons, heavily patched floor panels, and stuck windowshades were frequent reminders that our plane was nearing its end of service.
- When we arrived back in Detriot, the entire remaining Delta 747 fleet (5 aircraft) was present at the airfield. Two of the planes would be in service for another week, but our pilot told me that three of them were waiting for the farewell tour or were being sent directly to Pinal.
- The plane was packed out with flight enthusiasts who, like myself, jumped on the chance to travel in a 747 for what may likely be the last time. It wasn't difficult for us to find each other, and there were dozens of us.
Quite the opposite, actually. The tendency is for people to blindly accept even the most vague or ambiguous evidence when it supports the conclusion that we went it to, and to treat with extreme skepticism any evidence that supports a conclusion we don't want to be true.
There's a name for the phenomenon, confirmation bias.
For example, look at "creation science". A significant number of evangelical conservatives who treat climate change with skepticism are perfectly willing to unquestionably accept conclusions about the origins of canyons and other geological features that are based on extremely dubious methods of inquiry.
...and knowing how roads are "networked."
So maybe they'd need a database of information about the locations of roads and how they're connected to one another... say, a map?
I suspect that virtually all of the clicks on video ads are of the "trying to figure out where to click to make this crap go away" variety rather than "hmm, interesting ad, I'll forego the video I was about to watch so I can find out more about the product."
TFA does a better job than the summary at explaining, but yes, your observation is consistent. Wetter summers mean more vegetation growth, but it's the weather during a few critical weeks in late fall that determine how severe the fires will be.
It's the small stuff (leaves, brush, and weeds) that burns fast, hot, and explosively given the right conditions. In the fall, when the deciduous species lose their leaves, a wet December means that most of this vegetation falls to the ground and begins to decompose, rendering it more dense and less flammable. When you have a combination of dry weather, warm temperatures, and high wind, combined with ignition (historically caused by lightning, but usually by people these days), leaves tend to stay on the trees longer, or fall to the ground without decomposing, and become perfect fuel.
So yes, you're correct that when this stuff dries out, it becomes a hazard.
For example, last fall was a historically notable fire season in the southern Appalachians. Many parts of the mountains in NC/TN/GA had little to no measurable rainfall for a couple months, so the leaves simply dried up and stayed on the trees rather than changing color and falling to the ground. The deadly fires that swept through Gatlinburg, Tennessee became "canopy" fires - an event more common in California but virtually unheard of in eastern forests. Even one good rainstorm could, in theory, have been sufficient to knock enough leaves off of the trees and compress the leaf litter on the forest floor to render it slightly less flammable.
Over the last few decades, advertising by tobacco companies has been significantly curtailed (source). Have you ever noticed that these days you never see a cigarette ad on TV, at a sporting event, or on a billboard? Just about the only place you're likely to see tobacco advertised is in the window of a convenience store that sells them, and even those usually just feature nothing more than a brand logo and the price.
The page at the first link was updated with a link to their data, complete with a list of all the offending sites that are ranked in the top 10,000 by Alexa.
As one of the links even mentions, Facebook was caught doing the same with status updates (recording everything you type, even if you delete it before posting) back in 2013. What's news here is the extent to which websites are doing this these days.
For years now I've been operating under the assumption that websites collect as much data on user interaction as possible, even including things like what links you mouse over (not necessarily click on), how long you spend reading content before moving on, and how long the cursor remains on different parts of the page. This is yet one more reason why I never browse without NoScript and uBlock Origin. Fortunately, as reported in the first link:
Does tracking protection help?
Two commonly used ad-blocking lists EasyList and EasyPrivacy do not block FullStory, Smartlook, or UserReplay scripts. EasyPrivacy has filter rules that block Yandex, Hotjar, ClickTale and SessionCam.
Now that this practice is getting a little more attention, here's hoping that more of these sites will be added to popular blocklists.
I have a nervous habit of idly swirling the mouse around while I read, and I've long suspected that sites were logging these movements. So, it's a habit that I've never tried to break, but rather I've been hoping that by passing the cursor over all sorts of page elements hundreds of times in the course of a few minutes, I'm screwing with their data collection somehow.
Remember back in the early 2000's, when you'd occasionally come across a website that was entirely contained within Flash? Remember how much we all despised those?
Well, we're basically back to that point with Javascript. When I want to read a few paragraphs of text with maybe a picture or two, why should I download 2+ MB of javascript libraries just so that the images can fade in from the background as I scroll down, or drift across the page Ken Burns style as I read?
With more and more sites these days, you get nothing unless you enable javascript. Just like in the days when Flash was abused, I now have to waste precious bandwidth and put myself at a security risk just so that some designer can try to impress me with their presentation.
One major difference I've seen with the 240v US style plugs is that they are often hidden behind the large appliances that they serve, so that you have to physically move your oven or dryer out of the way to even unplug them. Now, that's just personal observation, and might not be true in every case, and I have no idea whether that is by design or even required by code. They also require quite a bit more effort to unplug than the standard 120v plug, so much that I can't reasonably see my toddler unplugging one.
Putting on my cynical hat here... although the laws vary by state, it looks really bad if you as an employer were to fire employees for reasons like "low performance" and then neglect to attempt to fill those positions. The former employees would then have a really strong case for unemployment benefits (which they might not otherwise be entitled to if fired with cause, but again, that varies by location), or maybe even wrongful termination if they can make a convincing case that their former employer used bogus reasons to avoid calling the terminations "layoffs."
But, there's nothing that says you (the employer) actually have to fill those openings... just leave them open, interview someone every once in a while to put up appearances, and you can then make a claim like "well, we've been interviewing, but haven't been unable to find any good candidates" without ever actually filling the position that you want to cut.
Not only that, but in the mind of a conspiracy theorist, any attempts to downplay or suppress their theory simply validate it. What was just a kooky idea in a Youtube video becomes "THE CONSPIRACY THAT EVEN YOUTUBE IS TRYING TO HIDE!!!"
I personally know several people who have been swept up in the recent "9/11 was an inside job" craze (it's 2017 - why the hell is that even still a thing?) and it's impossible to have a rational conversation with them about it... because if you don't completely buy in or try to use things like logic and facts to explain how ridiculous they sound, they accuse you of having the wool pulled over your eyes and being manipulated by the mainstream media or the government.
I just screenshot the barcode ahead of time, then pull up the photo of the barcode at security and when boarding. Nobody's ever looked twice.
It's not brightness that's a factor, but the fact that wavelengths of light in the UV spectrum cause damage to cells. The amount of UV radiation given off by the sun is greater than what one would be exposed to while welding, even if the intensity of light in the visible range is greater.
So, the issue with cheap eclipse glasses is that they block most of the visible spectrum, but don't block an appropriate amount of UV, so those wavelengths travel right past your dilated pupils and strike the retina while you stare. Think of what happens when you get a sunburn - UV radiation damages cells in your skin - and imagine the same thing happening to the inside of your eyes.
Yes, it's the same in the US, too. I have an old iPhone that is no longer on a plan, which I use as a music player but it cannot send/receive data or make calls. However, in an emergency, it could be used to call 911 even from the lock screen.
If I want HBO's content, I need to pay an expensive cable subscription, I ain't doing that.
Not if you live in the US. We don't have a cable subscription, and sprung for the free trial of HBO Go last year (I think you get 30 days before you're charged?) so that we could catch up on the whole series without having to mess with torrents. Our original plan was to cancel the trial before we had to pay, but in the end we decided to pay for one month out of principal - $15 to binge watch six seasons was well worth it to us.
The aurora are not always visible all around the globe at the same latitude; they often appear brighter in one hemisphere and not the other at a given time. There's a good visualization here: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/produ...
So, it could very well be that Fairbanks could get a very good show one night (assuming it's not mid summer and it's dark enough) while Iceland might not see anything, even though they are both roughly at the same latitude.
Also, the aurora typically aren't as intense right at the poles, but are often most intense at less extreme latitudes around 60 degrees. So it's not unheard of for the aurora to be very impressive in Alberta, while not even being visible in the north part of the Yukon.