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

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.

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.

Interesting question. Here is my take (I have both a consulting and infra/data background):

* Yes, many companies need the help.

* However, they typically (not necessarily unfairly) have a dim view of consulting/consultants.

* They can't (or won't) prioritize stopping or slowing down feature development to make the infrastructure changes that will lead to significant improvement. Often the potential solutions are actually either known or obvious already.

* In systems of appreciable complexity, it can take a significant amount of time for a consultant to examine all the moving parts to come up with a good/reasonable set of recommendations.

* So, as a result, consultants are often only brought in when things have deteriorated to an extent where it really hard to help. One other case is upon change of control (company is sold or acquired); this might be a better point to implement change.

* Lastly, knowing what needs to be done is one thing; actually implementing the necessary changes "on the fly" is actually the hard(er) thing. Often the company's team just don't have the skills to do that. Accordingly the best results are often when you can bring in a team to both consult and help the team through the implementation/changes.

A Mac plus docker would have been fine a few years ago, but now with Mac arm64, things are getting complicated again. Stick with a decent Intel laptop + linux for now, unless you really just mostly use "user-side" stuff (i.e. not containers, linux, etc.)