Anyone who tried to pay for anything in Canada on 8 July 2022 knows that it's not that simple. The entire Interac network was shut down for over 15 hours, which meant that debit and credit payments through POS terminals were halted nationwide. It was chaos, I was away from home and was unaware that anything had happened because I had no phone service. There were long lines everywhere, and a stranger paid for my coffee with cash, because the single toonie I happened to have wasn't enough.
The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.
They are always pressurised during normal use. When they are depressurised because of a water main break or for maintenance (and they try to do this as little as possible), orders are given to flush the lines before drinking any of the water.
> In 1986, Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), prohibiting the use of lead in pipes, and solder and flux on products used in public water systems that provide water for human consumption. Lead-free was defined as solder and flux with no more than 0.2% lead and pipes with no more than 8%.
> In 2011, Congress passed the RLDWA, which revised the definition of lead free and took effect in 2013. Lead free was now defined as the lead content of the wetted surfaces of plumbing products as a weighted average of no greater than 0.25% for products that contact water intended for consumption, and 0.2% for solder and flux.
A lot of municipal water systems have done more recent (but by no means required) improvements to the water itself to “coat” the lead in supply lines. Beyond just pH control, like orthophosphate. Most just in the last decade or so.
For Chicago, it’s an active project
> Polyphosphate is being removed because recent studies have shown that it may
negatively impact lead corrosion control.
> Polyphosphate was initially added with the orthophosphate to mask discoloration of the water from metals such as iron or manganese.
A lot of brass fittings and fixtures with lead in them. Makes it easier to machine.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of no-name Amazon and aliexpress plumbing fixtures still have a lot of lead in them. Keeps your cutting tool/machining costs down.
Even big box stores that are careful sell a lot of high lead plumbing parts - they are just marked not for potable water and sold for use with gas pipes.
- parking mandates that push everything very far apart because parking takes up a lot of space
- zoning restrictions that necessitate distant travel because your home is in a different sector of the city as your place of work, the grocery store, and places of leisure
- the disassembly of public transport systems after the war
- street design that makes it simply dangerous to travel on foot or on a bicycle, and extremely slow, because cars receive priority at all junctions
No parking mandates here. It's rural. Zoning restrictions are everywhere (except Huston where you have oil refineries next to housing), it's almost all residential. No real public transportation to speak of around that time frame. In-town speed limit is 25Mph and there is about 90-95% coverage for sidewalks. I walk daily anywhere from 3 - 5 miles around this town, I don't feel unsafe.
etc. etc.
You and others in this thread are arguing about _where I live_. Don't you find that a tad silly? I haven't even named the town, you have no ability to research it, and the historical docs are all located at the local library and history museum.
This is a great place to be a ped and driving is a requirement. Maybe this is the golden holy land of mixed-use roads, or something.
The games, not the expansion. You could throw any microsd card into your 3DS to get more storage. I’m talking about the memory card the games are written on.
Any Logitech device that supported both Bluetooth and Unifying, such as the MX Master, allowed you to cycle through up to stored 3 connections of either type. The older, cheap devices generally only had a single connection.
Logitech also makes or made keyboards with 1-2-3 hot swap keys that allowed quick switching with a single press.
FedEx recently started sending me mail to my parent's address saying I owe them $65 for a product I bought from the US a while ago... in 2014. I wonder if this is related to the whole Trump tariff thing? I haven't paid it, and I won't unless there's a good reason for me to.
Are you sure it is really FedEx? Definitely too old for tariffs. Probably too old for any claim against you. I’ve seen a lot of shipping related scams in the last two years.
Oh it's definitely real, because I recognize the product I bought, and it all matches up perfectly to my records. It even has an old phone number on the letter (but current at the time), which is probably why they haven't called me.
I vaguely remember paying the duties and customs in cash to the driver, but I don't know for sure. This was likely the first international purchase I ever made that had a separate duties charge, and I remember being surprised by how much it was when it was delivered.
HD has really good self checkouts though. They don't require any interaction with the touch screen except hitting "Done", nor do they have over-sensitive anti-theft scale systems.
It's just a wireless barcode scanner on a table with a receipt printer and a payment terminal. The screen shows everything you've scanned with pictures! and legible product descriptions, which makes it really easy to make sure you scanned everything correctly.
I bet it works better for Costco because they don't stock any items with weights low enough not to be registered by the scale.
Also, the last time I went to my local Costco, you were no longer permitted to check yourself out at the self-checkouts. They didn't remove them, but they had started using them as cashier-staffed checkouts.
That was the old NCR Fastlane implementation, done wrong. They left the item security feature enabled and left the bag scales turned on. This also happened at IKEA US (which lead to them being pulled out for a long while).
A lot of retailers have dumped NCR and gone in-house for their self checkout software packages now and made it so much better. Home Depot took their custom point-of-sale and built their own self checkout frontend on top of it to allow all checkout lanes to “convert” to self checkout.
Target also did the same, dumping NCR’s software and rolling in-house software on top of the hardware to make it Not Suck.
... except at the "PRO" checkouts. Which are actually just ordinary check-out lanes. Anybody can go through them. The signs mean nothing whatsoever.
I never go through their self-checkouts unless I've only got one or two pre-packaged items. I usually park on the "PRO" side, enter through those doors, check out on that side, and leave through those doors.
The cause of the failure was multi-fold: all of Interac's Internet links relied on the Rogers' network in one way or another, so when one went down, so did the other.