MystikIncarnate

This can't get said enough. HR is not there to help you. HR is there to keep you from being able to sue the company if something happens.

If you have, or someone gives you a cause to sue the company, before hiring a lawyer and possibly (likely) losing your job because you're suing your employer, you can instead take the complaint up with HR. They should recognize the liability for the company in your situation and take steps to minimize or eliminate any possibly perception of blame that could be cast upon the company.

Here, I'll give you an example of something that actually happened to me. I used to work at a grocery store and to say the "left hand doesn't know what the right is doing" .... Would be an understatement. It was a fairly large place in a national chain of stores. I was working in the produce department at the time.... So, the supplier for grapes informed us that the location where the grapes are grown has black widow spiders in the habitat. Though every effort is made to prevent it, there is still the possibility that the grapes may contain traces of venomous spiders.

Corporate HR appeared, like a fart you didn't hear, but you can definitely smell. They tasked my manager to get everyone in the department to sign a paper that said, and I shit you not: we've been made aware of the possibility of black widow spiders in the grapes, and that we understand that we should use specialty gloves that are bite resistant/bite proof when handling the grapes.... As soon as I read that I turned to my manager and said what fucking gloves? Where are these gloves?

We, of course, didn't have any such thing. I asked the manager if they could get some for us and they didn't even know how to do that.

Simply: after everyone has signed the statement, and if anyone is bitten by a black widow, the HR dickwads that work at the company can hold up the form you signed saying "we tooky them to use the gloves for safety, and they were not using those gloves at the time of the incident" .... Because nobody ever got the gloves. Regardless, it lets the company throw you under the bus for getting injured, while management won't help you in staying safe on the job, often encouraging the behaviour that HR says you should not be doing.

HR is not your friend, they're actively protecting the enemy (the business owners) from you, the worker.

Herd immunity is pretty important.

The first of the crazy parents who went anti-vax benefitted greatly from Herd immunity. Now enough of them are not vaccinating that the herd immunity is basically non-existent. So we get things like measles outbreaks.

There are people who are medically incapable of getting vaccinated, like those with compromised immune systems (some might be in treatment for cancer)... And their best defense is if all of us, who can be immunized, are immunized.

Cancer treatments are not the only immunocompromising thing that can happen and not all immunocompromised people have cancer specifically.... For the record.

Anyone who is anti-vax should be aware that they are actively and intentionally putting other people at risk and that should be strongly and thoroughly documented; so when they bring in a cold/flu/COVID/measles/whatever preventable disease to the school and someone else's kid dies as a result the grieving family has the ability to sue them into poverty.

They deserve worse, but legally, I can't condone that.... But if someone wanted to take a page from a particular person named Luigi, I would be hard pressed to find a good reason to pursue any charges against them.

Interestingly, I have some nurses in the family and the rate at which people who are educated in healthcare, are anti-vax, is too damned high.

Which isn't to imply its a lot of people, but any nonzero amount of people, working in healthcare, who buy into anti-vax propaganda, is too many. You've been formally taught about this stuff. Yet, you're anti-vax because some person on Facebook/Twitter/whatever, fed you some bullshit about the "dangers"?? Wow. What the actual fuck.

My recommendation is to maybe get some electrical safe tools, possibly some gloves that insulate against shocks, but definitely a good non-contact voltage detector, or NCV.

Check the circuit with your NCV before turning off the power, before working on the things on the circuit, and after turning on the power when you're done (before you switch anything on). It helps keep you and your house from halting or catching fire.

.... And always connect ground wires first.

Good luck.

Fair enough.

If you're not an EE or a nerd (like me), then it might as well be black magic.

Powerline adapters are fun here tho. They work great if you're not crossing the split phase, otherwise they suck.... A lot.

I'm not an EE. I apologize if I gave that impression. I just have an obsession with understanding anything I use on a regular basis, whether computers, smartphones, electricity, vehicles.... Anything that does stuff, and I use it, I want to know how it does the thing that it does.

I'm weird like that.

I learned a lot from "Electrician U" on YouTube, along with a few others. Maybe worth a look. The scientific/physics side of things was more from watching other YouTubers (as to why it behaves the way it does), along with a fundamental knowledge that I learned from doing amateur radio stuff. Working in IT and having to deal with the power requirements of systems and making sure that we won't blow a breaker under load.... That helped motivate me to learn.

It all came to a head when we were deploying a network and server for a business that was still in construction of the facility. The electrician was going to run a temp line for our stuff so we could set up and be ready for opening day, and he asked how many amps we needed.... I did a bit of a deep dive to figure out an answer for him, and I've been learning more and more since then.

Oh this gets stranger.

It's usually 120v, but I'm not going to split hairs over 10v.

So, 120v is not a voltage that is delivered from the grid... Technically speaking. Each home is given one circuit of 240v, which is usually part of one leg of a three phase, coming off of the Transformers... 120v is there because they center-tap the transformer. This halves the voltage by consequence. Inside the house the circuits are generally laid out to try to balance the load between each half of the 240v phase.

The idea is that two 120v loads, put in series, will total 240v. So power will ideally go from L1 to a 120v load, to "neutral", then over to another 120v load, then finally back on L2.

More or Less.

120v is basically just half of what you should be loading the system with.

The center tap neutral from the transformer is to collect any load imbalance between L1 and L2 to allow for the two "sides" of the phase to be out of balance and still work.

The US "plug" ( aka receptacle ) is a NEMA 5-15R, or NEMA 5-20R (for 20A); these are designed for 120v operation using the half phase described above. Of course, you can mis-wire it and make all kinds of dangerous abominations if you so choose. There is, however, a less known NEMA 6-15R and NEMA 6-20R that is basically the same, but for 240v operation, replacing the neutral wire with L2 instead (and 15/20A respectively).

So it is entirely possible to have 240v outlets in a North American home, while still being compliant with code.

It's actually really fascinating information when you dig into it.

Ty for the heads up. Cheers!

Yeah, I kinda went off on a tangent there....

My brain is weird

I'm not going to link shame.

You like what you like.

I won't disagree. Most billionaires are at least indirectly responsible for significant harm and loss of life. Whether they support, endorse or profit from inhumane, cruel and exploitative business practices, such as we see in the cobalt mines of the Congo, or other mineral mines whether for diamonds, lithium, or whatever...

Or they are profiting or directly befitting from people who are underpaid, and eventually, because of corporate profiteering, forced into poverty and they die because they are unable to afford to live... Or they are denying people life saving pharmaceuticals though supporting or profiting from the drug industry, or ownership therein (in whole or in part)....

Or they're more directly responsible for harm by being an active voice in, or in support of, denying, deposing, and delaying, anything that might reduce a companies profits, especially healthcare companies.

The reality of it is: when you achieve a certain level of monetary wealth, your money is invested. Frequently those investments support something that doesn't causes harm and death to your fellow humans.

Therefore: anyone with sufficient wealth to warrant investments, is almost always, someone endorsing, supporting, or profiting from the pain, suffering, and deaths, of other people. QED: all billionaires are evil, mass murdering pieces of shit, who should be strung up and quartered in the town square. I will settle for seeing their heads roll.

Where did I put my guillotine?

Both is the correct answer.

I'm just putting an emphasis on the healthcare industrial machine in the USA because it's causing more acute harm to the people of the USA than anyone else.