Most self-checkouts I've come across have weight validation – "Unexpected item in the bagging area".

Categorising things as "bananas" tricks the checkout into accepting the weight of an item, and you pay the appropriate price per bananagram.

You can build a socioeconomic graph of the country by how anal the unexpected item in the bagging area sensors are.

Some places will detect a fly farting on the damn scale, others can take three or four kids climbing on it before it complains.

The walmart near me apparently doesn't even use the scale at all, I had a full cart once and asked the attendant what to do, and they said just put the bag back in the cart.

The grocery store down the street though is exactly like this, gotta stack everything up on the scale to make it happy.

The only time I had Walmart bitch at me was when it thought I hadn't scanned an item - it was all camera and not weight.

And yes, the grocery ones all seem to be tuned really high.

There is a grocery store about 2 miles from my house that will freak out if you look at it funny. I gave up one day, the helper person came back for the 3rd or 4th time to unstuck the "self"-checkout in my ~20 item shop. I told them they can just cancel the transaction and walked out. I now go to the grocery store 8 miles away, that always has at least 1 human cashier open in addition to their self-checkout lanes. I rarely use the self-checkout because they are the ones that are only useful for a handful of items, but I've never had it give me a problem.

This is a more expensive form of shoplifting though, idk why even bother with the banana thing, as hilarious as it is.

Presumably there's a slightly lower risk of getting caught, as casual observation suggests a normal shopper paying for their groceries.

Agreed, but there's nobody looking if you're putting the items in the bagging area or not. You could simply leave an item last, pay, put it in the bag, and go. They do have (prominent) cameras over the tills I've seen, though, not sure if that's just "we see you" or if they're doing some item recognition with that.

Well of course, Dihydrogen-Oxide kills hundreds of thousands of people every year - even small amounts can be fatal.

Statistically 100% of everyone who ingests dihydrogen-monoxide or has it present in their body dies.

Even more alarming - 100% of everyone who doesn't ingest or have enough dihydrogen-monoxide in their body will also die.

Fatal with, fatal without - it's the ultimate killer.

thank you!

An unempowered individual (a John Doe) threatening to destroy a civilization might be an unhinged individual, a terrorist, or a nusiance.

A President of a significant world power threatening to destroy a civilization is politics in its ultimate form: the power to f** over anyone it wants to.

Any subsequent backtracking/negotiation/etc is also part of politicking.

It's the uncomfortable underbelly of some societal structures.

Current page title from the CNN site:

    > "Trump threatens ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ ahead of his Iran deadline"

Listed as "Live updates" so the title may change over time

Consumer pricing in the UK is regulated with a price cap (per kWh), so consumers can't be fleeced in an unexpected event.

Business energy users aren't protected, so they buy long-term contracts, hedge, or go-under in the event of an unforeseen energy-shortage.

    > "They could export the surplus"

Negative prices generally indicate that the transmission connections are already saturated: as much energy as possible (or financially/technically acceptable to the third parties) is already being exported.

Transmission capacity and interconnectors are usually the bottlenecks.

I've had various pains with QBittorrent (nox) which seem to vary based on the version of the client and the version of libtorrent used. Out-of-memory and resume issues, but varying according to the torrent size, number of simultaneous downloads, and version/configuration specifics.

Torrent software (the clients and the libraries) feel a little out-of-sync with prevailing torrent sizes and bandwidth availability.

Same, I've wired the house for Cat6 and have a Cat6 prosumer switch, so 25 wired devices pulling at 1Gbps?

I clearly set my ambitions too low and should follow the Swiss model :-)