tal

No, because the DBMS is going to be designed to permit power loss in the middle of a write without being corrupted. It'll do something vaguely like this, if you are, for example, overwriting an existing record with a new one:

1. Write that you are going to make a change in a way that does not affect existing data.

2. Perform a barrier operation (which could amount to just syncing to disk, or could just tell the OS's disk cache system to place some restrictions on how it later syncs to disk, but in any event will ensure that all writes prior to to the barrier operation are on disk prior to those write operations subsequent to it).

3. Replace the existing record. This may be destructive of existing data.

4. Potentially remove the data written in Step 1, depending upon database format.

If the DBMS loses power and comes back up, if the data from Step #1 is present and complete, it'll consider the operation committed, and simply continue the steps from there. If Step 1 is only partially on disk, it'll consider it not committed and delete it, treat the commit as not having yet gone through. From the DBMS's standpoint, either the change happens as a whole or does not happen at all.

That works fine for power loss or if a filesystem is snapshotted at an instant in time. Seeing a partial commit, as long as the DBMS's view of the system was at an instant in time, is fine; if you start it up against that state, it will either treat the change as complete and committed or throw out an incomplete commit.

However, if you are a backup program and happily reading the contents of a file, you may be reading a database file with no synchronization, and may wind up with bits of one or multiple commits as the backup program reads the the file and the DBMS writes to it -- a corrupt database after the backup is restored.

Some databases support snapshotting (which won't take the database down), and I believe that backup systems can be aware of the DBMS. I'm not a good person to ask as to best practices, because I don't admin a DBMS, but it's an issue that I do mention when people are talking about backups and DBMSes -- if you have one, be aware that a backup system is going to have to take into account the DBMS one way or another if you want to potentially avoid backing up a database in inconsistent state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Woman

As the Invisible Woman, Susan can render herself wholly or partially invisible at will by bending light around her.[50] She can also render other people or objects fully or partially invisible too, affecting up to 40,000 cubic feet (1,100 m³) of volume.

EDIT:

Invisible Girl

Initially, her powers are limited to making herself invisible. However, before long Sue discovers she can make other things invisible as well as create force fields of invisible energy.

No, but I have purchased Early Access games on Steam.

Big-box stores like Walmart (WMT.N) and Target (TGT.N),

Neither of these are big box stores.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big-box_store

A big-box store, a hyperstore, a supercenter, a superstore, or a megastore is a physically large retail establishment, usually part of a chain of stores. The term sometimes also refers, by extension, to the company that operates the store. The term "big-box" references the typical appearance of buildings occupied by such stores.[1]

Commercially, big-box stores can be broken down into two categories: general merchandise (examples include Walmart and Target)...

Frankly, I'm not sure that it's a good idea to have life-critical systems on the Internet in the first place, issues with backdoors aside.

Canda's interest is, I expect, to do whatever provides the most political leverage on Trump relative to the cost to Canada. If high egg prices are a cost-effective way to do that, then sure. My guess is that there are a lot of factors that go into that, though.

I would guess that if Canada is doing targeted tariffs -- which they stated that they were -- that the best things to hit are in swing states (which Presidents have to worry about the most), in politically-influential industries, on products that are very visible to consumers, and in areas where Canada can deal with higher domestic prices relatively-well. Given that a major Trump concern in his first term was the auto industry, was what got the most significant change in the USMCA changes, maybe that. They did list vehicles as one of their targets.

This is assuming, though, that Trump isn't just aiming to get in the news for having tariffs for a short period of time, declare that his policy was a success and that fentanyl has been dealt with, and then pull the tariffs. If that's the case, then I wouldn't expect this to go on for long.

You're right that it's principally bird flu, but it'll still count towards inflation. CPI -- what people are typically referring to when they say "inflation" -- has a basket of goods which I strongly suspect includes eggs. If the price goes up, that's inflation.

goes to check

Yeah.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t01.htm

Meats, poultry, fish, and eggs

Though that whole category, which is not egg-exclusive, only makes up 1.737% of the weighting for the basket. So it's not as significant as, say, the cost of housing in calculating inflation.

https://unitedegg.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Facts-and-Stats-Summary.pdf

According to this, as of 2019 -- which is a couple years back, though probably good if you want a pre-avian-flu number -- Americans had a per-capita rate of 279 eggs consumed a year, up 16 percent over the twenty years prior.

EDIT: according to this, numbers are about the same in 2023, dipped a little bit over the past couple years, but looks like there's a pretty low price elasticity of demand.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/183678/per-capita-consumption-of-eggs-in-the-us-since-2000/

In 2023, consumption of eggs in the United States was estimated at 281.3 per person. This figure was projected to reach 284.4 eggs per capita by 2024.

EDIT2: On a non-statistical note, eggs are goddamn delicious.

people cannot just use any phone they want, it needs to be a specific model supporting their network carrier, especially the network bands.

No, you can get phones that will work with any carrier's frequencies. There are some differences in phones and carrier frequency support, but there's loads of overlap -- a phone will be able to talk to another carrier's network. They have to for roaming to work.

What you may be thinking of is phones that are "locked" to a phone provider's network, which is very common when getting a phone. Basically, you get a phone plan and receive a phone from the carrier at a price that loses the carrier money. The carrier then goes and makes up the difference with higher monthly rates on your plan than would have normally been the case -- basically, attaches a small loan to the plan. It lets phone companies have a low up-front price. It's questionable as to whether this is a good financial idea for consumers, but it's not a technical limitation. As I recall, there's some regulation that requires carriers to unlock carrier-locked phones upon request after a period of time.

kagis

Yeah.

https://www.fcc.gov/general/cell-phone-unlocking

Postpaid Unlocking Policy. Carriers, upon request, will unlock mobile wireless devices or provide the necessary information to unlock their devices, for customers and former customers in good standing and individual owners of eligible devices after the fulfillment of the applicable postpaid service contract, device financing plan or payment of an applicable early termination fee.

Doesn't affect me, because I've only ever purchased unlocked cell phones.

Trump may have actually lowered the price of eggs -- albeit not of products in general.

So, he just imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Canada and Mexico stated that they would impose agricultural tariffs in response -- not a surprise, as the US is a major agricultural exporter. The list of countertariffed items is not up, but:

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2025/02/canada-announces-155b-tariff-package-in-response-to-unjustified-us-tariffs.html

A full list of these goods will be made available for a 21-day public comment period prior to implementation, and will include products such as passenger vehicles and trucks, including electric vehicles, steel and aluminum products, certain fruits and vegetables, aerospace products, beef, pork, dairy, trucks and buses, recreational vehicles, and recreational boats.

They don't explicitly list eggs, but they do list things adjacent to that, and I can believe that eggs might be on the tariff list.

The US runs a trade surplus in eggs.

https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/eggs/reporter/usa

2022 exports: $549 million, top partner Canada at $77.4 million

2022 imports, $118 million, top partner Canada at $8.19 million.

Trump's 25% tariffs will tend to reduce the amount of eggs being exported from Canada to the US, which will drive up egg prices in the US.

However, if the Canadian countertariffs -- also 25% -- have eggs on the list, which we don't yet know, they will tend to reduce the amount of eggs being exported from the US to Canada, which is about ten times the amount coming the opposite direction. That will tend to drive down egg prices in the US...and one would expect that effect to dominate the effect from reduced egg exports from Canada to the US.

reads a few web pages

I don't know about the EU, but it looks like in the US, if Amazon is selling a product directly -- as it once did for all products -- it bears liability. But if it is just acting as an intermediary between a non-Amazon seller and a customer -- kind of like how eBay works -- it doesn't. I assume that in that case, liability is on that seller.

Might be the same sort of situation in the EU.

I wonder if this EU directive just affects Amazon or also places like eBay. Amazon could presumably basically just sell stuff from Amazon in a worst-case scenario, but for places like eBay, I'd think that that'd have a huge impact on their business model.

EDIT: Also, if the product description is an input into liability, which I'd guess might be the case...hmm. So, right now, a non-Amazon seller selling through Amazon can write their product description. But suppose it, I don't know, sold a given product with a description that rendered it unsafe, like selling a box of rat poison as delicious candy. The rat poison itself might be safe if it were sold as rat poison, but not in the context of being sold as food. If Amazon is liable for that description, I'd think that they wouldn't want to permit sellers to write their own descriptions. That seems like it'd have a big impact as to how they operate.