Yep. Renting a truck where you could actually haul a load of dirt or mulch, or tow anything, you will need to go to with a "commercial" rental which will be 5x the rate for a consumer rental or "Home Depot" truck rental. The Home Depot/consumer trucks don't even have a tow hitch.

LOL, the Home Depot flatbed I rented a week ago (the $19 deal although I went a little long and ended up paying $32 total) had just hauled a load of dirt or mulch. No one read me anything saying I couldn't use it for purposes other than carrying a Home Depot purchased item (although that's what I was doing). The HD page for the F250 flatbed does say they only supply a hitch if you are renting something towable from them but says nothing about using it for other purposes (like hauling dirt).

The fine print is on the cantract and not elsewhere.

> A pause in processing of immigration visas affects the tech industry

Is an immigration visa the same as a work visa? I don't know much about the different types of immigration. The stated reason for the pause in immigration visas is to keep out those who would end up being a "public charge." I interpret this as people who want to come to the US but have no demonstrated means of support once they get here.

Student visas, I presume, are unaffected? What about work visas? If you're coming to work, you would also be paying taxes and not need public support.

Comcast doesn't let you change your DNS unless you run your own router. And they also rate limit you if you do.

I’m on Comcast with a UniFi cloud gateway max with my DNS pointed towards adguard. I have not noticed any rate limiting. I actually don’t know how they would rate limit against DoH.

Pretty sure you can do it at the individual device level, in the OS's network settings.

Verizon is a traditional for-profit telco. Not some VC funded startup trying to hit a burn rate. Very unlikely they were overstaffed by 15k, sounds more like overzealous cost-cutting to hit a quarterly target.

Which greatly increases the cost of setting them up.

Would be very tough to implement in the US, as proposing any sort of "national ID" is pretty much a nonstarter, at least up to this point.

States could do it, and maybe agree on some protocols so that things like privacy-preserving "age verification" could be done.

Maybe the feds could push it like they did with speed limits: make federal funding contingent upon adopting e-ID. Would still get a lot of pushback.

The problem with e-ID is its focused on identity verification, not just age verification and that's where the problem lies.

We still need the ability to be psuedoanonymous online. We should be able to verify age without divulging any identifying information to the service requesting age verification.

An e-ID registry could work on a sort of public/private key system so long as the services requesting informatino from the registry only receives a yes or no of "is this person old enough" and no further information.

Or the term "pub." In the US it's much more usual to say "bar." Maybe "tavern" but that sounds rather dated to my ear.

When I lived in the PNW people used the word pub more than bar.

My sense is that it is an affectation meant to indicate an aspiration to something more than a bar (and its coarse patrons).

That’s because everybody up there thinks that liking soccer makes them English.

"Bar" is certainly the catch-all term in the U.S., but "pub" is also very widely understood to refer to a specific type of bar, especially (but not limited to) bars deliberately styled as Irish or British pubs.

Along a similar note, I hate when a Bar is labelled as a "Pub" and doesn't serve food. IMO, in the US, if it's labelled a "pub" it should serve food.

Come to Virginia, where it's outright illegal for any establishment serving alcohol to not also serve food (and not only must food be served, it must account for at least 45% of revenue).

Do they make you order food with every round of drinks? I remember hearing about places like that from my dad, and it seems it would have worked better in the era of cheap drinks/low built-in alcohol taxes.

They easy way would be to do like in some parts of Spain, for every drink you receive a tapa.

That way it can be considered that the food is part of the price of the drink.

I went to college in a county that only allowed alcohol sales with food for clubs (think: country clubs). So, of course, the restaurant that I worked for created its own club. You simply filled out your name (and maybe phone number, I don't remember) on a piece of paper when you ordered your drink.

I'm nut sure I'd go that far... it's just I expect a "Pub" to include pub food.

every now and then you'll find a public house or similarly named

"Pub" is a fairly common term throughout the world. But "pub that needs you" made it pretty obvious that it was about pubs in England.

Did it? I put my postcode in and got nothing. It took browsing the map to discover it had no results for Scotland at all.

Yes. Being on the other side of the world, I've only ever heard of efforts to save English pubs. Thus, without more details, one knows that is what is being referred to. Perhaps Scotland has the same kind of movement happening at the local level, but something on a global website implies global context.

The website is for England and Wales.

Next step: the same government that is demanding the age verification will ban VPNs.

Yep.

> For example, in 2025, Wisconsin lawmakers escalated their war on privacy by targeting VPNs in the name of “protecting children” in A.B. 105/S.B. 130. It’s an age verification bill that requires all websites distributing material that could conceivably be deemed “sexual content” to both implement an age verification system and also to block the access of users connected via VPN. Another proposed Michigan bill requires “An internet service provider providing internet service in this state [to] actively monitor and block known circumvention tools.” Circumvention tools being: VPNs.

https://www.eff.org/pages/vpns-are-not-solution-age-gating-m...

Everyone seems to forget that using VPNs to violate your local laws gives lots of good ammo to the authoritarians that want to ban VPNs. The answer isn't to use a VPN to get around it (and thus give fodder to your enemies) but to change the law.

While I agree with this in spirit, here in the UK both major parties along with the public at large generally support these types of laws.

Two of the major parties support it, but it's not entirely obvious how much public support there is; it's not most people's top issue, and it's easy to make polls say what you want depending on the question you ask.

You'd get different answers if, for instance, you ask "do you want to have to show ID or submit a picture of your face in order to access many sites on the Internet".

I'm not sure there'd be much of a difference because the British people are broadly speaking a rather paternalistic society.

The entire concept of public support breaks down when the majority of the public doesn't actually know what a VPN is.

I would guess the vast majority of parents support these laws. They are disgusted with the social media platforms who shrug and pretend they are just dumb pipes when it comes to filth, predators, and harmful content, while at the same time keeping users engaged with addictive algorithms and tracking everything every user does and knowing everything about them.

But it's easier to ask a relative few ISPs to block VPNs than it is to police the behavior of millions of individuals.

Not especially feasible if you want to support businesses. More likely is trying to demand that VPNs also enforce age verification, which business-targeted VPNs might do, and then ban the ones that don't.

I doubt this would be workable.

They could, sadly, however, make it a crime to bypass things like The Online Safety Bill. Downloading or using Tor, for example.

At that point, the only sane option is to become a criminal.

In a shell script situation, you'd typically trap EXIT and ERR and remove the fifo in the handler.