Interesting yes, but surely not "Disastrous", all the men from the Endurance survived. Now, Scott's expedition was a disaster.

This is silly though. For an IT company, what should the #2 cost be? Legal? It is an IT company....

It is a good point. However a lot of IT companies have differing Industries within it, not easy to paint with a simple brush of 'IT Company' like what would you define an IT company as?

The "old" british standard is even cooler: https://www.plugsocketmuseum.nl/OldBritish1.html

You can still get similar to those today. 5A sockets, for plug in lighting.

Yeah, those are the same standard - they're still legal. The large ones were used in theatre lighting until recently (wiring is radial and you don't want a fuse to blow 5m above the stage in any case).

I think India still uses them, too.

2A plugs and sockets are just cute.

As a South African (living abroad for many years, but still with the bulk of my extended family there), this seems overly alarmist. If you review https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis , very few consumers experienced anything like 50% of total hours without electricity even in the darkest days of the load-shedding in 2023. And 2024 was, comparatively, a good year, probably the best since 2020/1.

RE the police force and private security, that has been a fact of life in South Africa for decades, not a new development. Anyone with the means employs private security, in the same way that anyone with means utilizes private health care, not public health care. Here South Africa is not that much different from other high-crime and high-inequality countries like Brazil and Mexico.

Mail me at (redacted) and I provide his contact address. You may want to give him some tips.

To be honest I may have exaggerated the power outage ratio, as I am not a first-hand observer; but I tend to give some credibility to his description of the living situation over there, esp. as they want to move.

My point is more or less that denying things, even if not fully true, strengthens demagogues like Trump instead of weakening them.

As long as the amounts are small, and from a variety of cards, no normal (real) card processor is going to notice/care. Cannot speak for Stripe.

More recent analog: https://simpleflying.com/tupolev-tu-22-booze-carrier-why/

84 hours/week is for amateurs. Call back when you hit 100 per week consistently.

I have used one of the original 4k TVs-as-a-monitor ( https://www.avsforum.com/threads/review-of-the-seiki-39-4k-d... ) as my central monitor (plus one on each side) for 10+ years now. Not feeling any need to upgrade (don't do graphics/games, just lots and lots of text terminals and browser windows)

All of them?

What do you mean? Prices are going up. Costs have been falling since AWS was introduced faster than they have reduced prices. I am willing to bet that their gross margin is higher today than it was last year, 5 years ago or 10 years ago.