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Cake day: August 30th, 2025

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  • I have an old laptop I use as a server, it sits on top of a cabinet in the corner of my room. One day I noticed it seemed like the space key was being held down all the time, but only past the login screen. I was about to buy a new laptop because I thought the keyboard was totally broken (and its kind of old anyway). Turns out an old Bluetooth keyboard in my closet that was paired to my laptop got switched on at some point and the space bar was being pressed.





  • devedeset@lemmy.ziptoMildly Infuriating@lemmy.worldBritish plugs
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    2 months ago

    The USA approach to this is to mandate a comical number of outlets everywhere (to prevent extension cord usage), mandate a large number of individual circuits (especially for things that draw a large amount of power), and more recently some combo of AFCI/GFCI/CAFCI breakers (to provide some level of sensing things going wrong and shutting off power).

    The stats are not great for the USA in terms of number of fires. I haven’t done deep research. From personal experience, most homes built after modern US electrical code was fleshed out are generally fine. Modern homes (or ones upgraded to modern code) seem very safe - the “smart” breakers tend to actually work.

    My anecdote here is that my relatively small hometown area (15,000 people, largely built up between 1860-1940) still has frequent fires relating to electrical and heating systems and the current city I live in (95,000 people mostly built up starting in ~1960) has very few fires ever. I spend 2 weeks a year around Christmas back in my hometown. 3 of the last 7 years had a structure loss fire while I was there. In the same period of time there have been 2 structure loss fires in my current city total.



  • The truth is somewhere in the middle. GDP per capita is not really a good measure of quality of life on its own.

    Historically the USA has brought a lot of people (most?) out of poverty by the world standard. Recent policy seems to be heading in the opposite direction. Quality of life has been declining for a long time, IMO mostly with our sense of community, the completely broken healthcare system, media consolidation, absurd levels of car dependency, high cost of having children, and a whole bunch of other location-specific factors (like cost of living in metro areas)