Looking at the images you've attached, this appears to be an 8 ft wide by 6 ft tall fence. That's a good amount of weight in just the wood, and there isn't any part of the design that diagonally braces the frame, except the steel cable... which tore from its mounts.

My layman's view is that you absolutely need diagonal wood elements, which should only be installed after unloading the fence, either by removing the boards or by propping up the wheel-end so the frame returns to being squared. If the wheel interferes with this, remove it for the time being.

But I think you'd still need the steel cable, and if that has broken from its originally designed mooring, then this gate is already compromised. You may have to start over with a new Adjust-A-Gate kit or repair the current one so the cable will mount to the steel parts, rather than the wood.

I would say to rectify the diagonal supports first, before doing anything with the hinges, since if the hinges were actually the root problem, this gate would have already fallen over. That said, it seems to me that such a wide gate might have called for more substantial hinges.

The other commenter's suggestion to consider a pair of less-wide gates is also sound, if the goal is a minimal-fuss gate that will last at least a decade of additional sagging and weather.

commercial appliances didn’t take any stand-by measures to avoid “keeping the wires warm”

Generally speaking, the amount of standby current attributable to the capacitors has historically paled in comparison to the much higher standby current of the active electronics therein. The One Watt Initiative is one such program that shed light on "vampire draw" and posed a tangible target for what standby power draw for an appliance should look like: 1 Watt.

A rather infamous example of profligate standby power was TV set-top boxes, rented from the satellite or cable TV company, at some 35 Watts. Because these weren't owned by customers, so-called free-market principles couldn't apply and consumers couldn't "vote with their feet" for less power-hungry set-top boxes. And the satellite/cable TV companies didn't care, since they weren't the ones paying for the electricity to keep those boxes powered. Hence, a perverse scenario where power was being actively wasted.

It took both carrots (eg EnergyStar labels) and sticks (eg EU and California legislation) to make changes to this sordid situation. But to answer your question in the modern day, where standby current mostly is now kept around 1 Watt or lower, it all boils down to design tradeoffs.

For most consumer products, a physical power-switch has gone the way of the dodo. The demand is for products which can turn "off" but can start up again at a moment's notice. Excellent electronics design could achieve low-power consumption in the milliwatts, but this often entails an entirely separate circuit and supply which is used to wake up the main circuit of the appliance. That's extra parts and thus more that can go wrong and cause warranty claims. This is really only pursued if power consumption is paramount, such as for battery-powered devices. And even with all that effort, the power draw will never be zero.

So instead, the more common approach is to reuse the existing supply and circuitry, but try to optimize it when not in active operation. That means accepting that the power supply circuitry will have some amount of always-on draw, and that the total appliance will have a standby power draw which is deemed acceptable.

I would also be remiss if I didn't mention the EU Directives since 2013 which mandate particular power-factor targets, which for most non-motor appliances can only be achieved with active components, ie Active Power Factor Correction (Active PFC). While not strictly addressing standby power, this would be an example of a measure undertaken to avoid the heating caused by apparent power, both locally and through the grid.

How were you measuring the current in the power cable? Is this with a Kill-o-watt device or perhaps with a clamp meter and a line splitter?

As for why there is a capacitor across the mains input, a switching DC power supply like an ATX PSU draws current in a fairly jagged fashion. So to stabilize the input voltage, as well as preventing the switching noise from propagating through the mains and radiating everywhere, some capacitors are placed across the AC lines. This is a large oversimplification, though, as the type and values of these capacitors are the subject of careful design.

Since a capacitor charges and discharges based on the voltage across it, and because AC power changes voltage "polarity" at 50 or 60 Hz, the flow of charge into and out of the capacitor will be measurable as a small current.

Your choice of measuring instrument will affect how precisely you can measure this apparent power, which will in-turn affect how your instrument reports the power factor. It can also be that the current in question also includes some of the standby current for keeping the PSU's logic ICs in a ready state, for when the computer starts up. So that would also explain why the power factor isn't exactly zero.

An outside description of Squatober: https://www.garagegymreviews.com/squatober

I like the concept of a month-long squat fitness challenge but I personally don't jive with the notion of having to follow two Instagram accounts daily to get the next day's program description. My life requires a bit more advance notice than that.

Agreed, it's a very bad design. If your school speed limit covers most of the daylight hours on weekdays, is the implicit suggestion that it's fine to drive faster on weekends and during nighttime? The street should be rebuilt to enforce the desired speed limits, not with paint or signs.

Oh, we're talking about the letters on the glass. My bad lol

You may want to include a photo of the piece, ideally many photos from various angles.

But to be frank, unless you find someone within a max 1 hour's travel distance, it's not likely someone will be found who is also willing to take on this project. Wood furniture is, for all its pros and cons, heavy.

At its very core, an insurance company operates by: 1) pooling policyholder's risks together and 2) collecting premiums from the policyholders based on actuarial data, to pay claims and maybe make a small profit. But looking broader, an insurance market exists when: a) policyholders voluntarily or are obliged to obtain policies, b) insurers are willing and able to accept the risks in exchange for a premium expected to support the insurance pool, and c) the actuarial risks are calculable and prove true, on average.

The loss of any of A, B, or C will substantially impact a healthy insurance market, or can prevent the insurance market from ever getting started. For some examples of market failures, the ongoing California homeowner insurance crisis shows how losing B (starting with insurers refusing to renew policies near the wildland-rural interface) and C (increase in insured losses due to climate change) results in policies becoming unaffordable or impossible to obtain.

As a broader nationwide example, an established business sector that operates wholly without insurance availability is cannabis. A majority of US States have decriminalized marijuana for medical use, and a near-majority have legalized recreational consumption. Yet due to unyielding federal law, no insurer will issue policies for marijuana businesses, to protect from risks that any business would face, such as losses from fire, due to a product recall or product liability, or for liability to employees. These risks are calculable and there's a clear need for such policies -- thus meeting criteria A and C -- but no commercial insurer is willing to issue. Accordingly, the formal market for cannabis business insurance is virtually non-existent in the USA.

With these examples, we can see that the automobile insurance market meets all three criteria for a healthy market, but it's how these criteria are met which is noteworthy. Motorists in the USA are obliged to insure in every state except New Hampshire and Virginia: it is a criminal offense to drive a car without third-party liability insurance, meaning the motorist might spend time in jail. Note: NH and VA won't send a motorist to jail, but they do have administrative penalties for driving without "financial responsibility", which includes insurance or a bond at the DMV.

The exact requirement varies per state, with some requiring very low amounts of coverage and others requiring extra coverage like Personal Injury Protection (PIP, aka no-fault insurance). The point is that criteria A is easily met: motorists want to avoid jail, but also want to avoid the indignity of being sued after having caused a road incident, in addition to protecting their apparently only viable mode of transportation.

Insurers can take into account the overall trends in national risks trends for automobiles (eg new car safety, through the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, IIHS) as well as local or hyper-local risks (eg hail damage in the southeast, property crime in a particular zip code). And as a large country with nearly as many cars as people, many insurers are willing to meet the demand. This satisfies criteria B and C.

So well-organized is the automobile insurance market that you could almost say that it's vertically integrated: the largest nationwide insurers have contracts in place with every dealership network, auto collision chain, new and used parts dealers, as well as automatic data sharing with state DMVs, plus with firms like CarFax that buy information. Despite each state being slightly different, the insurers have overcome and achieved a level of near uniformity that allows an efficient market to exist.

Things are drastically different for the American healthcare system and for American health insurance companies. While most think of their healthcare provider as a national name like Anthem Blue Cross or Kaiser Permanente, the reality is that each state is an island, and sometimes counties in a state are enclaves. Even federal programs like Medicaid and Medicare are subject to state-level non-uniformities. For example, hospitals can be either privately operated (eg religion-affiliated, or for-profit) or run by a public entity (eg county or state), and can exist as a single entity or form part of a regional hospital network. Some entities operate both the insurance pool as well as providing the health care (eg HMOs like Kaiser Permanente) while others dispatch to a list of contracted providers, usually being doctor's own private practices or specialist offices.

With so many disparate entities, and where healthcare is a heavily-regulated activity by each state, the cost of insurable risks -- that is, for routine healthcare services -- is already kinda difficult to compute. Hospitals and doctors go through intense negotiations with insurers to come to an agreement on reimbursement rates, but the reality is that neither has sufficient actuarial data to price based on what can be borne by the market. So they just pass their costs on, whatever those may be, and insurers either accept it into their calculations, or drop the provider.

Suffice it to say, there are fewer pressure to push the total cost of healthcare down, given this reality, and more likely prices will continue to climb. This fails criteria C.

Source

Briefly speaking, it's fairly self explanatory why people would want health insurance, since the alternative is either death or serious health repercussions, paying out-of-pocket rates for service, or going to the ER and being burdened by medical debt that will somehow haunt even after death. Criteria A is present.

As for Criteria B, that was actually resolved as part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). During discussions with the drafters, insurers bargained for an obligation for everyone to have insurance (aka the individual mandate, bolstering criteria A), in exchange for an obligation to issue policies for anyone who applies, irrespective of pre-existing health conditions. Thus, Criteria B is present for all ACA-compliant policies in the USA, even though the individual mandate was later legislatively repealed.

So to answer your question directly, the costs for healthcare in the USA continue to spiral so far out of control that it causes distortions in the health insurance market, to everyone's detriment. Specific issues such as open-enrollment periods, employer subsidies, and incomprehensible coverage levels all stem from -- and are attempts to reduce -- costs.

Enrollment periods prevent people from changing plans immediately after obtaining an expensive service, like a major surgery. Employer subsidies exist due to a federal tax quirk decades ago, which has now accidentally become an essential part of the health insurance and health care situation. And coverage levels try to provide tiered plans, so people can still afford minimal coverage for "catastrophic" injuries while others can buy coverage for known, recurring medical needs.

But these are all bandaging the bleeding which is unchecked costs. It would take an act of Congress -- literally -- or of state legislatures to address the structural issues at play. The most prominent solution to nip costs is the bud is to achieve the same near-vertical integration as with automobile insurance. This means a single or very few entities which have contracts in place with every provider (doctors and hospitals), negotiated at once and uniformly, so as to achieve criteria C. The single-payer model -- which Medicare already uses -- is one such solution.

Going further would be the universal healthcare model, which discards the notion of health insurance entirely and creates an obligation for a government department to provide for the health of the citizens, funded by taxes. This means doctors and hospitals work at the behest of the department for the citizenry, or work privately outside the system entirely, with no guarantee of a steady stream of work. Substantial administrative savings would arise, since the number of players has been reduced and thus simplifies things, including the basic act of billing and getting paid for services rendered.

These models could be approached by individual states or by the nation as a whole, but it's unclear where the Overton window for that idea currently is.

But they have also garnered a cult status among young people, who are using them to get around with friends, take their surfboard to the beach and commute to school.

Hmm, it's almost like young people aren't being given other viable transportation options, so they flock to the mode which affords them freedom and flexibility. Should we be surprised then, that the artificial barrier for youths was breached one day, and that day is now?

IMO, the story starts far earlier, with poor government policy failing to provide transport for all. I'm no expert on Australia transport priorities, but whatever they've been doing for the last so-and-so years clearly isn't working for the youth. So it's no surprise that these councils are being caught off-guard, when their negligence finally comes to bear.

I'm not a Rust developer (yet), but I understand its strength in this regard as: Rust is statically memory safe by default, and code which isn't statically memory safe must be declared with the unsafe keyword. Whereas C++ has not deprecated C-style pointers, and so a C engineer can easily write unsafe C code that's valid in a C++ compiler, and no declaration of its unsafeness is readily apparent to trigger an audit.

It's nice and all that C++ pioneered a fair number of memory safety techniques like SBRM, but the debate now is about safety by default, not optional bolt-on safety. All agree that the overall process to achieve correct code is paramount, not just the language constructs.

Oh wow, that might be the shortest-representation IPv6 DNS server I've seen to date: 2620:fe::9

For other people's benefit beyond my own:

RIIR: "Rewrite It In Rust"

OSM can definitely find you a bank near a freeway ramp, but it can also find you a bank near a creek to make an inflatable boat getaway. What it can't do is arrange for decoys to confuse the police while you eacape.

The inflatable boat robber was ultimately caught and sentenced a year later.