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The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the educational equivalent to HIPPA.

Well, no, its the law that contains the educational parallel to the privacy and rights of record access parts (but not the rest) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996.

Aside from the wrong acronym, the privacy and access rights are the central focus of FERPA, but pretty far down the list for HIPAA, despite being what many people think it is centrally about—which is why both “rights” and “privacy” are in the name of FERPA but (despite the joke about the common error in the acronym that “the second P in HIPAA is for Privacy”) neither is in the name of HIPAA.


Do you have a water drain in your bathroom floor?

This is uncommon in the US, so a bath overflow quickly becomes a significant structural issue.


In Japan it's very common for bathrooms to be wet rooms; likewise South Korea and Taiwan among others.

To add to this, it's so nice. Sit on a stool in the middle of the room and rinse, soap up, scrub to exfoliate, rinse, then roll the lid of the bath open and soak in a sub much deeper than an American one. Bath is programmable to maintain a constant temperature.

Basically a spa experience every day.


I wish more people knew how nice it is! And the toilet is in a completely separate room so there's no contention among one person who wants to take a bath and another who needs to use the toilet.

I just wish dish washers and dryers were more common in Japanese households. I'm in Okinawa where dryers are a lot more "standard", but dish washers are relatively rare.


All my tubs and sinks in the bathrooms have an 'overflow drain' near the top which you are unable to fill beyond. Is there any reason why that wouldn't be sufficient?

It makes the tub taller than it is deep by a little bit and doesn't look as nice are the only reason I can think of. A little bit of splashed water just isn't a big deal in most wet bathroom setups. They could also just put a drain right off the side of the tub.

My Japanese style bathroom here both has an overflow in the tub and a drain in the middle of the room.

Yeah, if the drain in the sink is clogged. US bathroom pipe is 1.25" which will (probably) lead to a 2" and 4" pipe eventually (depending on when, where, and how your house was built ofc). The hole in the sink leads to the same initial pipe.

But USA bath tubs have overflows (redirecting water into the drain if the taps are left on), surely?

In the US, any tub made past about 1900 or so has an overflow drain that prevents overfilling. The adoption of such drains not quite contemporaneous with the adoption of indoor plumbing, but very soon after.

It's the metal plate usually just below the faucet that looks like it might be useless. But it has an opening underneath to let the overflow water in. These are always sized to handle more water than the faucet can output.

This is basically a non-concern in anything but very, very old, unremodeled bathrooms.

The sinks do as well, but it is more obvious.


Im not sure about bathtubs, but in the U.S. it's apparently legal to sell lavatory sinks without an overflow. Ask me how I know.

This puzzled me and I looked it up, and yes, sinks without overflow meet code [1] (but not tubs). So your situation was apparently legal.

But the sibling comment to this one, where a sink had an overflow, but it was not connected, did not meet code [also 1].

Go figure. There must be some reasoning there, but I'm confused as to what it is.

https://forms.iapmo.org/email_marketing/codespotlight/2018/m...


Code sometimes makes allowances for situations which aren't ideal, as long as they aren't deceptive or creating a false sense of security.

So if you have old two-prong outlets in your house from back when, those are allowed.

If you replace them with a three-pronged outlet which is ungrounded, that breaks code.

If the three-pronged outlet is a GFCI outlet labeled with NO ELECTRICAL GROUND, that is allowed.


My last apartment had the overflow drain hole but it wasn't attached to anything. The water just went directly into the wooden cabinet underneath. Madness. Literally worse than not having the hole because it reduced the capacity of the sink. This is what happens when landlords who DGAF hire handymen who DGAF to do all the work on their units.

To be fair to the potential handyman or contractor many overflow drains are integrated into the sink drain before they attach anything. It might have been the landlord buying temu style sinks with fake overflow holes.

Many overflow drains are not or are poorly connected. If you buy a new home, the inspector will usually skip to overflow test because it will likely fail.

Well, it's also legal to sell food that tastes bad. Doesn't mean you should buy it.

Considering that US houses usually either have a crawl space, basement, or are on a slab the lack of a drain is weird when you think about it. You would think wet locations would be required to have a drain.

I think a lot of European houses have floor drains in the bath, you can basically hose the bathroom down.

More on topic. Outside of the US R290 (propane) heat pumps are common. But illegal in the US because the refrigerant manufacturers control the code bodies. You can have a 20lb propane tank hanging off a BBQ which in normal operation is literally on fire. But you can't have an R290 monoblack cause it's too dangerous.


> I think a lot of European houses have floor drains in the bath, you can basically hose the bathroom down.

Weirdly, in the UK it's common to have carpet in the bathrooms.


The tub sits in a big shower booth. Other bathroom amenities like sink and washing machines are installed outside the booth. Toilet is usually a separate room entirely. So no problem overflowing water onto the floor since that's how you take a shower.

Bathroom floor drain is common (might even be a code requirement?) in commercial buildings but not in homes.

I believe it’s mandatory in Australia

Yes, I can't remember seeing a bathroom or laundry here that didn't have a floor drain. Seems insane for that to not be standardised. I briefly lived with a bathroom in the UK that was carpeted?!

i briefly lived in a house that had second floor laundry with no tray or floor drain. the first day after installing a new washing machine it flooded and did over 30k damage to carpet, drywall, and installed electrical. Insurance would not cover installing a floor drain or tray, and the owner chose to let that decision stand.

truly bizarre


For a long time, no - it was completely unusually for my work that references biological information about migratory birds/other (innocuous) seasonal phenomena.

About a month or two ago, they must have tightened the black list on bio topics as it became more willing to process requests without visibly downgrading to Opus.


There is ~10-15% markup for Costco online delivery orders vs in-store prices.


Have you tried getting a good, unused name today? Anything remotely close to a dictionary word, if unused, is squatted with a $xx,000 price tag. Do registrars get a cut of these sales prices because it seems ridiculous to allow squatting.


Many registrars operate as brokers for domain sales indeed (i.e. godaddy, namecheap). Then you have tlds operators with their "premium" domains that go for 1000x the regular price. Premium usually being defined as the top 10k english words and every kind of l33t spelling of sexual words.

Neither registrars nor tld operators care about squatting, even when they don't get a cut. Why would they? The squatter is paying them the same as you'd pay them.


Well, at least there's still some room for that with some of the new TLDs.

But at some point we will also exhaust all nice TLDs too...

It will be even more difficult than it is now


Registrars get a lot more domains registered at 5-20 $/year this way. How would our lives improve if squatting were "not allowed"?


For anyone trying start a small business, it’s frustrating to go through dozens to hundreds of potential company names before you can find a reasonable URL that isn’t being squatted for 4-5 figures.

What positive outcome comes from squatters sitting on unused domains?


I grew up in a small town in the upper Midwest and always had a strong pull toward the neighboring forests, streams and wetlands. There was a lot of wonder at that age, but I wasn’t prepared to really start contextualizing the depth/breadth of information until I was much older (which has obvious parallels to the systems/complexity thinking I enjoy elsewhere in my life/career).

As an adult, I have found great value in assistive tools Merlin and Seek/iNaturalist for bird and plant identification. I would encourage everyone to try out Merlin at least once to learn more about all the great variety of birds in your neighborhood.

I am also building a personal tool that captures and analyzes various environmental data sources (GIS, weather, phenological factors, species-specific habitat factors, etc) so that I can explore landscapes/ecosystems in my area (Minneapolis and MN/WI more broadly) to make the ecology/terrain legible and support observing various target species (fungi, migratory birds, fish runs, wildflower blooms, and so on).

The format of the tool is very map/visualization/dashboard heavy which is fine for me - but carries too much bulk for friends and family. The project for this fall/winter is rewrapping the iOS experience around a quiet phone/watch/earbuds field-mode that only surfaces information/guidance/cue-stake recognition in skill-preserving/developing and eyes-up/phone away experience.

It’s a fun project.


Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.


This has been happening for more than a hundred years now... 90%+ of the people have been farming not that long ago, and mechanized farming equipment has replaced 95%+ of those workers.

This doesn't mean 4 hour workweeks or majority of people not needing to work, but it means that some of you can be social media managers, others can integrate AI chatbots in apps that don't need an AI chatbot, some can rewrite existing software in whatever the language of the week is, etc. Without offloading all that farming to machines, we'd never have what we now consider for "normal" and "must have".

Those few farmers left (2-3% of the workforce, depeding on the country) want to earn money too, so they can buy smartphones, watch netflix and have that smart toilet seats that open automatically and wash your butthole. If all those replaced-by-machines workers don't produce all that, where's the point in farming food for them?


Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?


That’s interesting. I find it completely unusable for even simple reviews of existing project documentation that I wrote for an iOS app that isn’t even in public distribution.


Or link sales commission to delivery success, and have no sales people...


You have a source to share for that framing of the tax spend?


Although not quite exact, here's spending data for 2024 (https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/static-data/published-report...) - about 14% of tax dollars went to defence, 0.14*17000=2380.


That’s just federal spending. $17,000 sounds too high to just be federal taxes, it looks like federal + state/local. Accounting for that, military spending is closer to 10%.


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