After losing power twice for over a week in the depths of winter We installed a transfer switch to allow hooking up a generator. This cost around $200 (my brother-in-law did the electrical for free). We already have a generator built-in in to the truck camper parked in the driveway. The truck camper is setup as an emergency shelter when parked - fully stocked with food, water, and fuel (I live in the PNW and we are expecting the BIG ONE any second).

The transfer switch has multiple switches that allows me to power different sections of the house. I tested everything running the generator - the furnace, the fridges, select lights - it works like a charm. The generator runs off propane and I have 8 bottles of extra in the shed in addition to the large tanks in the camper. Propane is very stable in long-term storage so it is my ideal fuel.

My point being that I don't know where the cost of a home generator is between 7k and 15k. Even if I purchased a separate generator dedicated to house back-up this would be around 2k. The transfer switch would be around 1k for the average consumer. That is 3k. What am I missing about these estimates?

I live and hire people in Colorado, and a bunch of recruiters contact me about remote roles. Most companies that fear transparency just advertise very broad ranges, e.g. $100-200k. I'm sure some companies refuse Colorado employees, but nobody I've talked to seems concerned.

The market for engineers in Colorado is very hot. What we're seeing is the smaller Boulder/Denver startup scene from the past decade transforming into a larger and more stable market as companies like Ibotta, Guild Education, SendGrid, etc. are hiring a ton of engineers. And you still have lots of smaller startups competing for talent.

There was this case where Pornhub hosted a lot of rape footage of teenagers[1]. Victims came forward, they testified of their abuse and said that they tried very hard to remove videos involving their sexual assault from the platform. They were however unable to successfully do so because not only were Pornhub careless and unresponsive, the videos would shortly after being removed (if they ever were) resurface on the same platform. A petition was launched and signed by circa 2 million people (including myself). Pornhub was brought to court[2] and found themselves forced to remove any material that they could not verify was consensual. Millions of videos ended up getting purged[3]. Visa refused to handle payments from them as a result of what had happened[4].

What Pornhub and by extension its mother company MindGeek has done is obviously beyond despicable. After myself knowing the context of some of the services that these payment processors have refused to work with (particularly in the “adult” industry), I would never call what they are doing censorship. I’m instead happy that someone with authority is stepping up. Could this authority be abused? Sure. Is the aforementioned an example of abuse of authority? Absolutely not. It’s an example of when people in authority are doing their job. I don’t want to see anyone’s mother, sister or daughter getting raped and have their rape being filmed for the sexual gratification of millions of viewers online. Seeing Visa and others do the right thing in this case is a breath of fresh air.

[1] https://traffickinghubpetition.com/

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=b4auDHtorGM

[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/pornhub-purges-a...

[4] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/14/business/mastercard-visa-...