Wheelie bins work well where most habitation units have their own private land (garden, yard etc) to store them. But most of New York has multi-floor, multi-apartment housing units, above street level. Do all those blocks even have elevators?

Earlier this year, I visited an area of student accommodation - with terraces of small houses, all divided into separate flats, each in multi-occupancy. The rear access lane was lined on both sides by continuous ranks of wheelie bins. And when the wind blew, they all set off for one end of the street...

Wheelie bins are a solution for the landed middle classes, dreamed up by planners who don't have to manage them in their own ivory towers. Good luck New York.

When I lived in a foreign city with multi-floor, multi-apartment housing units, the bins were the large industrial type and they were emptied every day, 365 days per year. And that worked.

In Germany, especially in the East, we have large districts with multi-floor, multi-appartment buildings (socialist era prefabricated buildings, but also build in the 1970s in larger West German metropolitan cities), usually up to 5 floors with many entrances, some more than 100 meters long (or enclosing a street block). Taller units can be found in larger cities, normally up to 11 floors. They often still have the original garbage chutes where garbage is collected in large bins at a basement room, lifted up by house keepers. We typically have large and heavy plastic bins (up to 1,100 liters; ~290 gal) on four wheels with locking brakes. It needs a storm and loose brakes to move them. There are even different types for coastal regions to prevent stronger winds from opening the sliding lid. A couple of bins are either enclosed by fences at outside collection places or they are enclosed separately in a concrete housing with sheet steel doors at front and drop-in flaps on top. You need the right key to open the gate resp. the flaps (garbagemans use master keys). About once a year bins will be automatically cleaned with hot water by a machine built into a truck. But as Richard objected, some land is required for collection places which belongs to the buildings not far from entrance(s) (and not near heat-insulated building facades --> styrofoam... fire hazard).

My appartment house (5 floors, 2 entrances, 20 larger family flats) shares one 1,100 liters bin with a neighboring house (5 floors, ~40 small flats). There are separate bins for garbage, uncleaned packaging and paper/cardboards. Packaging (payed by food producers) and paper is free, only garbage costs a hefty service fee. Large landlords (often municipally owned or cooperatives) try to balance the amount of garbage of different houses to the right number and sizes of bins to minimize tennant's costs. Waste disposal is an expensive public service here, often assigned by authorities in long-time contracts to large companies operating nationwide.

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You know it's hot outside when this happens:
Blinds Melt in Arizona Amid Historic US Heat Wave as Temperatures Hit 118F

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Does this qualify for a Darwin Award?

Yes it does. It was so stupid and he took himself out of the gene pool.

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Grant
Darwin NT

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Prepare for a rocky ride- looks like there's a big internet meltdown in progress- reports of network issues here in Australia for multiple major businesses, and also reports from overseas of network issues developing.
Another backbone botched software update?


Edit-
Reports of Supermarket checkouts down, flight check-ins down.
The ABC, SBS & Sky media have all had systems affected. ABC video editing systems are down, but live broadcasting is still occurring. Reports of all NSW government departments being affected, including police & fire services.
Universities, law firms, Bunnings, blood donation services, banks and supermarkets are among the places have been reported as experiencing outages.

My super fund, Australian Super is reporting issues- account login isn't possible. Their web site is slower than a week of wet Sundays.



Maybe this is the cause of this one-

There's lots of discussion online about the possible cause of the outage.

We do know that Microsoft has reported a major technical outage affecting operations across the world.

The company said it was investigating issues with its cloud services in the US which had caused the grounding and cancellation of several flights.

Microsoft said its outage started at about 6pm ET on Thursday (8am Friday AEST), with a subset of its customers experiencing issues with multiple Azure services in the Central US region.

Azure is a cloud computing platform that provides services for building, deploying, and managing applications and services.

Separately, Microsoft said it was investigating an issue impacting various Microsoft 365 apps and services.

So if they're not using Azure, they're OK. If they are, then they (and you) are screwed till they undo whatever they did to stuff things up.


Could be a cascading issue- supposedly the initial Central US problem has been resolved, but other regions are now having Azure go down in a screaming heap.

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Grant
Darwin NT

I’m in the middle of the United States and internet service is a bit slow lately.

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This is looking ugly- now being reported as due to an issue with Crowdstrike Falcon

"Crowdstrike is a global cyber security company who provide detection and monitoring tools to cyber and IT teams.

Found this on Hacker News.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41002195

> Summary

> CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows hosts related to the Falcon Sensor.

> Details

> Symptoms include hosts experiencing a bugcheck\blue screen error related to the Falcon Sensor.

> Current Action

> Our Engineering teams are actively working to resolve this issue and there is no need to open a support ticket.

> Status updates will be posted below as we have more information to share, including when the issue is resolved.

> Latest Updates

> 2024-07-19 05:30 AM UTC | Tech Alert Published.

> Support

> Find answers and contact Support with our Support Portal

And these

17min ago We have ~50 thousand laptops in reboot loop and ~1.5k servers as well. No resolution yet.

23 min ago Husband is a deputy in California. His department and many others here are down as well (including PDs, jails, ambulance companies, etc.)

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Grant
Darwin NT

Sounds like a denial of service attack.
I got a notification of one of my old accounts being compromised. It was photobucket. No loss there. I think we all stopped using it when it went pay for use years ago.

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Multiple reports of a fix for an affected system-

Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment

Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory

Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it.

Boot the host normally.

Apparently just renaming the CrowdStrike folder to something else allows you to re-boot normally.
I feel for those with hundreds (and thousands) of affected systems.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Sounds like a denial of service attack.

Worse than that- a broken software update for an enterprise anti-virus/ anti-malware programme.

All well and good for systems that are booting from the network.
But if the systems are booting from their own drive, i can't see any way of fixing things other than manually by booting each system into Safe Mode & editing the necessary file/folder.
Maybe a batch file to help, but still- it's going to suck hugely (especially with Win11 systems).



And the really brilliant part of this- the company has a Tech Alert post on the issue and how to fix it , but you have to have an account with them to log in to find out about it & what to do...

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Grant
Darwin NT

This is just plain messed up. Not to mention a FEDERAL crime.
Not the USPS truck.

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Worse than that- a broken software update for an enterprise anti-virus/ anti-malware programme.

Just imagine what chaos would ensue if this happened after we are all relying on AI.

Or if AI pushes the updates ...

Wishing you a Happy Virus-Free Friday,