Trainguyrom

Around mid-2020 I worked at a callcenter. The organization I worked for had lower tiers of support via a callcenter in the Philippines and higher tiers via the stateside callcenter I worked at. When everyone went remote some of the staff at the Philipines callcenter emigrated to other countries and there was one particular member who always had some very noisy chickens in the background of their calls. It seriously reminded me how nice remote work can be for folks because this guy was chilling at home with his chickens nearby instead of in a stuffy office with a bunch of other unhappy underpaid callcenter workers. It was funny though how some customers reacted to it, sometimes it would just be one more thing for angry customers to complain about and other times it would be a wistful thing a customer commented about in a later positive review

So that's all I know about that specific instance, but this individual is a retired guy living in low income housing, and his wife left him specifically because of his political views (and he loves to complain about it) so he's clearly winning at life

So part of the reason for the whole envelope situation is that letter envelopes will go through postal sorting machines which will bend the contents so anything that can't be bent (for example I once needed to mail a forgotten car key to a family member) can't be sent in a letter envelope.

Usually the solution is padded envelopes, or for certain things there may even be special postage available like USPS's Bound Printed Media rate for mailing books (which can I add is such a hilariously federal government-grade obtuse way of saying "books!") but there's also "non machine" postage rates available too.

Basically boxes are the easy solution but there's more efficient solutions available if you're willing to do a very small amount of research. For people packing it can be as simple as "I can quickly toss this in a box and not worry about it further"

Y'know what, I honestly haven't looked at what the PCIe lane layout is like on newer chipsets. Maybe it's gotten better since I last really paid attention like 5+ years ago. I remember in early-mid AM4 there was a lot of grumbling about how there's only 20 PCIe 3 lanes followed by early PCIe 4 platforms that would give only 16-20 lanes with another 8 or so PCI 3 lanes. I also didn't really pay much attention to AMD before AM4 given how far behind Intel they were. But I could be entirely out of date now that I think about it

So hardware that may still be perfectly usable but predates NVMe should be tossed out then?

The exact same thing you already have to do to upgrade the memory on such a computer, you go buy used/old stock DDR3 or cannibalize from another system. Pre-NVMe systems are DDR3 era and older. Time goes on, interfaces update and anyone looking for compatibility with their older system will need to either use an adapter or buy used/old stock. If there's enough demand like with motherboards there can be a random Chinese brands making new hardware for old platforms using a mix of new and cannibalized parts

I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn't great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that's its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability

Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)

Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had "vista-ready" badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I've replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)

The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they're connected to. Heck my wife is using my decade old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids' new computer

They're called ozone generators. Handy machines for getting smells out of stuff but not anything you can be in the room while it runs

My general opinion is that organ donation should be opt-out. Most people aren't organ donors not due to any real objections to the practice but purely because they don't know that they aren't.

Make it easy to opt out for any reason, but also make it easy to opt back in if you change your mind, because bodily autonomy is important in any free nation.

But also people are lazy idiots and for no-brainer medical questions like vaccines and organ donation, they should have to put in a minimum amount of work to continue a bad practice for the wider population. Make the bad practice slightly more work than the good one.

There are no doctors in rural America

Yeah this is false far more often than it's true. I live in a small town (the kind where ambulance and fire services are all volunteers) with nothing but farming communities and farm/hunting land surrounding me. I have 4 hospitals in a 30 mile radius, and more clinics than I care to count

Yes there are some very poor rural regions of states where access to healthcare is a struggle, but they are the exception rather than the norm

I'm in the states and my kids had the option to get their flu shots at the school this year. Somehow one of my kids was skipped despite us immediately signing and returning the consent forms.

It does feel like it's very hit or miss whether or not flu shots are offered at the schools though. I remember getting the flu vaccine at the school just once and I never remember seeing lines or anything at any of my schools for flu vaccines the years I didn't get it at the school. I imagine they only do it when either there's special funding for it or the data says they especially need a lot more vaccination this year