stockresearcher

> But next comes ... "Viener". This is VERY strange. Where does this word originate? My first impression was it was from Vienna, a city; the german name for the city is "Wien"

Ok, so there is a company in Chicago named Vienna Beef, started by immigrants from Wien in the 1800s who made sausages using recipes they brought with them. In the 1900s they started making hot dogs as well, but high quality ones. You see, the hot dog in America has a reputation as being a pretty low quality meat product. There are now a number of companies that make quality products, Vienna Beef being one.

In a stroke of genius, Vienna Beef also sells neon signs of their logo to the roadside shops that will sell you a ready to eat hot dog, especially ones that do it “Chicago style”. It’s very Americana, and you generally see it in the middle of America, including Nebraska. So a lot of Americans have a word association with Vienna and a good hot dog. That’s really the only connection :)

If you’re the kind of person that finds American big cities thrilling, you will probably adore Paris as an ideal European metropolis. But it sure isn’t some fairy tail.

What kind of Walkman doesn’t play cassettes? Can’t wait to see what they come up with for a $9,999.99 Discman.

The default collation on MS SQL Server didn’t support Unicode until some fairly recent releases. Even though the database itself fully supported Unicode (you just had to pick a different collation).

So it’s entirely possible that they are using a fully up-to-date database, but the software depends on using a database collation that doesn’t support Unicode. I’ve seen software like that in active use even now. It can definitely get frustrating, and it’s not that hard to fix if you can just get some management buyin.

> You wouldn’t buy a loan if you thought it wasn’t going to be repaid.

Eh, people do weird things all the time.

Also, there is often extreme information asymmetry.

His neighbor is either lying or he's exaggerating.

Cook County has senior exemptions, senior freeze exemptions, and long-time homeowner freeze exemptions. They don't push any responsible homeowner into poverty. They also have a website so you can look up exactly what your neighbor's assessed value and annual tax is. There is no need to guess.

Yes, this is correct.

My uncle used to be in charge of the fire services in a mostly rural, sparsely populated county in a Western state. They bought their equipment used from well-funded dense suburban departments, generally in New York or New Jersey where equipment was in almost constant use and replaced often to ensure high availability. Once in a more rural area where some equipment might go a month or more between uses, such equipment was perfectly fine. They would keep them around for 3-5 years and then sell to a fire district in an even more rural area.

So there's always equipment. Just not always someone to operate it. Especially when you'd have to pay decent wages for a crew to sit around and do nothing for days or weeks at a time, these places instead either have volunteers or part-time employees that only come to the station when called.

You know what’s funny is that, thanks to the interoperability, all of my family members have switched their toll transponders to the Illinois I-Pass because Illinois charges no monthly fees or additional surcharges and doesn’t care where you live or what state/country your car is registered. I’m sure there are other participating toll authorities with no fees, but all the places my family members live do.

So really, you only need one state to adopt your unified transit fee idea.

Yeah, it’s a strange window into someone else’s life.

A few years ago I stopped at an estate sale in a small town I was passing through, far away from home. Picked up an 8-track player and a few dozen cartridges, the majority of which were mixes.

It was just fascinating to listen to. I’m pretty sure it was mostly obscure 1970s and 1980s country with the odd Blondie song thrown in here or there.

It’s kind of crazy that, in freedom & liberty loving Texas, there is no mention of relaxing or eliminating the ordinances that people don’t want enforced against poor people.

I’m up here in Illinois and our dysfunctional and incompetent village council has managed to get nothing done over the last 3 years, except eliminating a bunch of rules about what we can do with our own property.

I’m pretty sure that when the railroads went bust that nobody pulled up the rails and put them somewhere else. And when the internet bust happened, they didn’t pull up all the dark fiber and lay it down somewhere else.

I would bet that if all those GPUs go idle, they stay housed and cooled in the data center they were originally installed in, for better or for worse.

> no one repairs clothes anymore

My son and I volunteer at the local repair cafe. The clothing/textile repair area is usually the busiest area, and I'd say that at least half of the people working the sewing machines are young women of reasonably affluent backgrounds - college-age or younger.

Perhaps people don't need to do it anymore, but many are choosing to.

I used it a few weeks ago for a renewal. You upload the HEIC from your iPhone and it turns it into a jpeg with the appropriate resolution. The editor gives you the ability to make minor adjustments to the algorithmic changes it made, and then tells you that a human will review to ensure it meets the standard.

To be honest, the process was very well done, and the new passport was in my mailbox 5 days later without paying anything for expedited shipping.