As a professional-level baritone who has sung tenor parts quite a lot, there is a shortage of every low voice type (directors are often conflicted when I make the offer to sing tenor). People who can produce a chorally-acceptable A or Bb are in the shortest supply, though. It's getting worse as the amateur singing circuit gets smaller and the gender ratio gets more skewed.
Amateur-level choirs tend to have a lot more basses than tenors because it is easier to sing bass without effort spent on vocal training.
I am an amateur baritone, in school I was used for tenor parts because of course there was a shortage and I had good enough technique that I could sing tenor parts, if not well.
Now, I sing second bass for a men's choir, because that was what they were missing. I think all not in-the-middle voices are scarce.
Tenor parts are more difficult, technically speaking, and voices capable of the tenor range are rarer. So any given man joining a choir can more likely manage the bass range, and if they can, they can almost certainly manage the bass parts.
FTA:
> When men do join singing groups, they often avoid the tenor section. The tenor voice is “a cultivated sound”, says John Potter, author of a book on the subject. A man with no vocal training is more likely to have the range of a baritone (a high bass). It does not help that the tenor voice is associated with operatic stars such as Luciano Pavarotti, who could powerfully sing high notes that no amateur can easily reach. And the tenor line in classical choral music can be difficult, with many unexpected notes and alarming leaps.
surely a real bass is rarer? I just assume, as someone completely musically inept, based on listening to the vocal groups on the radio, that a bass contributes less, and can be omitted more easily?
People at the extreme ends of the spectrum of range are rarer and people in the middle of the range are more common. As it stands, choral bass parts fit better into untrained voices than choral tenor parts. A typical baritone (middle range male voice) can sing choral bass parts well enough, but will find tenor parts relatively strenuous.
I know many women who admit they "fall in love" anytime they hear a low bass. They might marry a tenor and never cheat on them, but every time their hear a low bass their heart flutters. Men know/see this and so tenors become less interested since their higher voices don't get the women (there are plenty of other ways they have).
Anecdotal I guess, but when I was in a high school choir, I loathed that my teacher assigned me to the tenor section. It did not fit with the image of myself that the high school version of me held in my head; "a man should be a baritone or bass after puberty!"
I liked choir and stayed in it for all four years, but I was never particularly good at it so what the hell did I know anyway.
"average bass steals all the love interests" factoid actually just statistical error. average bass steals 0 love interests per year. John Tomlinson, who steals 10,000 paramours per year, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Doing things puts you on the hook when those things fail. Politically it's much better to keep the limit in place so that you can make virtue signalling votes that are guaranteed to fail. That way you're seen as "doing something" but without having to be responsible for it.
There are many tools available in Germany that support you doing your tax filings. They have endless questionnaires in (tax law free) easy language that guide you through all the taxing niches. They not only respect all rules regarding the laws but also the latest jurisprudence.
Like: If you have a lockable, separate office and work (almost) exclusively from home, you can basically deduct the entire room for tax purposes (rent + electricity + heating + insurance + etc).
....but wait until Finanzamt comes along and measures the size and checks with a controller if this room is really ONLY for work - if there is the slightest sign that this room maybe used for other things, your plan is gone.
Even an additional single sofa/couch can crush this plan.
And: If you say the room is worth 500€, you dont get back this 500€ with yearly tax declaration - you only get this amount deducted from total income, rising your after-tax income a little bit. In fact, with this solution you loose a room PLUS some money - rather rent out the room 1 week per AirBnB and pocket this in cash and you are fine.
Obesity drugs are in the top 25 for 2025, but don't make up the largest plurality. That goes to oncology drugs at ~1/3rd. Obesity drugs are at ~14%.
I want to mention here that these oncology drugs are mostly antibody methods. Which, what the hell? We're making antibody drugs at scale now?! And that's like some of the highest selling drugs out there?
For comparison, though not in the linked article here, Acetaminophen (Tylenol) only comes in at ~$4.3B, which would put it way down in 13th place, out of the top 10.
Granted, this is sales numbers, and in the US, that's practically taking the savings of very sick people and turning it into stocks. Something that elicits no small reaction here on HN or just about anywhere.
Still, to the point of the main article, yes, we live in an age of medical miracles, and it arrived quite suddenly, only in the last 7 years or so, and we have a lot of gas in this tank.
Alkaline batteries only have 1.5V for a short time. In practice, toys are designed to opeerate off of 1V to 1.5V, because Alkalines vary _wildly_ in voltage during use.
NiMH at 1.2V _STAYS_ at 1.2V, even when drawing 1Amp or more (under these conditions, Alkaline would have long dropped below 1V).
EDIT: This is also a problem because "nicer toys" will measure the voltage assuming an Alkaline is "full" at 1.5V and dies at 1.0V. However, NiMH starts at 1.35V, then "plateau" at 1.2V, and stays there for most of its life, before rapidly falling off to 1.0V or .8V like a cliff at the end of its life. So NiMH life "cannot be predicted" by any simple metric.
I had an issue with the original Apple Magic Mouse that would not work correctly with NiMH batteries but work fine with disposable AA. The mouse would be fine for a few days then randomly stop working; using fresh NiMH would revive it again. I assumed it was due to 1.2v vs 1.5v but perhaps that particular mouse (or all Magic Mice) was just bad.
I have an acurite 5in1 weather station running on eneloops/laddas. It whines about the batteries being low but runs for about a month in any conditions. I just rotate and recharge them at the start of the month.
Looking at the discharge curve for an alkaline, much of the energy is below 1.2V even under light load. A device that works with alkaline and not NiMH due to voltage is broken as designed.
If you need 1.5V / 3V for some reason, you could maybe insert a tiny boost converter from AliExpress (1€, less than 1 cm in all dimensions). I have done that for a string of fairy lights.
Apple sold their own NiMHs (actually rebadged Eneloops) along with their own AA charger to go along with the Magic Keyboard/Mouse, so my bet would be on a faulty device. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Battery_Charger
You can now find 1.5V Li-on AA batteries with, and that's a game changer, built-in charger and a type-C port!
I have one in my wireless mouse. If it dies, I change it to a spare and charge it right from my laptop (and the battery that was empty becomes the spare)
I haven't used them, but IIRC they maintain a constant voltage until they're discharged, when it instantly drops to 0. That may be a problem, because if your device has any battery indicator, it will show the battery as full until the end. Nothing will tell you that you need to replace the battery before the device powers off. That's why I decided not to buy them. My mouse knows when my alkaline AA battery is low and gives me a warning.
I use rechargeable CR123 batteries in my August smart lock that face this issue. The solution is to have a spare set and rotate/charge on a fixed schedule before they die. I have a quarterly calendar reminder to do so.
Came here to post this. I'm 100% agreed with Mr. Geerling.
For a fun challenge try to find a non-built-in-battery arc lighter (eg: candles, grills, etc). When I found one I bought four (think camping/disaster bag... if everything is AA/AAA then having a shelf-stable fire starter is easier/safer than lighter fluid).
For a fun sidebar check out the "Panasonic BQ-CC87AKBBA" which is effectively a combo "in/out" battery charger OR USB battery pack(!). It'll suck in (unfortunately) Micro-USB and charge your AA's, then switch a button and it'll spit that power back out as a battery bank. When I find one like that for USB-C, it's going on my christmas list.
Look up plastic battery holders that hold 8-10 along with a 4x charger and I just swap batteries out and recharge them into that buffer/holding cell. I'll have to look into the Eneloops as I've been working with the Amazon Basics and generally have 1-2 batteries fail out every few months (and am specifically looking for heat-resistant / outdoor applications).
Last one: Lots of cheap solar products have cheap rechargeable AA batteries inside... you can generally open them up and swap the battery out if they're not working any more (and/or potentially scavenge the charging panel if you think about it!).
The NITECORE UM10 is an "in/out" charger too - it handles various sized LiIon batteries one-at-a-time. A switch on the end determines if it is charging or discharging. Their site says it's discontinued, but I thought I recently saw them at a shop in Seattle. Time to pick up a spare.
I had this charger once! Really cool with the powerbank option. Although, these days, 5V@1A with no PD is probably something to use maybe in emergency, it's too slow for modern devices.
I believe I have zero Alkaline batteries left in my house and I'm relatively surprised that pretty much everything works fine. If anything, I suspect the only problem is that some devices have an inaccurate account of how dead the batteries are. But I use Eneloops on everything, even things surely not designed at all to run on them. (And I reckon you could probably make more devices work if you really wanted to; adding an additional cell or two in series would surely give you a voltage that's in range, if you can figure out a good way to do it.)
Of course not all rechargable batteries are the same; there are a few different rechargable battery chemistries in the AA form factor. I like Eneloop Pros, though; they've been very reliable for me. I've been using them for years and I've never had to throw one out yet; supposedly they last over a thousand cycles with most of their capacity.
I think I have only one device that uses AA - my central heating's radio thermostat. This thing has caused me untold hassle, which is only partially down to the batteries, but still...
Totally OT, but does anyone have a good link on how the thermostat gets paired with the boiler? I'm thinking of getting replaced and would like to talk to the gas fitter from a vaguely informed point of view.
Personally, I keep things simple. Got a new (pretty basic) Honeywell thermostat after a kitchen fire; thermostat was pretty old anyway. For wiring, you mostly have 2-wire and 3-wire although there are a lot of variations as you get fancier: https://nassaunationalcable.com/blogs/blog/a-full-guide-to-t...
Number of zones in the house may affect things as may boiler only or AC being in the picture as well.
Thermostats (aka space temperature sensors) can have between two and eight wires. A boiler will usually have three: 24V power, call for heat, and common.
If your boiler has inputs on the terminal block for a thermostat, I would highly recommend buying a wired one, the 24V constant power removes the need for batteries.
If you can provide a link to your boiler’s installation and operations manual, I can tell you.
> good link on how the thermostat gets paired with the boiler?
You should have a book with the boiler that says how your system is setup. They nearly always include schematics and are very helpful. Typically you can open a cover and see the wiring details as well.
Forget about web sites, there are too many different ways a system can be setup, so even if they are not slop they can still be inapplicable for you. Once you know what you are looking at you can sometimes get useful information from the web, but until then you can't sort out what is useful for you.
Yeah. Have your manuals handy if you get a furnace guy/electrician in. My electrician actually wired up my thermostat wrong when I got a new thermostat in.
Sounds like an awful idea in general. Think KISS concept. But you'd have to look at manuals. There's probably no single answer. (I was thinking of wireless control of the thermostat itself.)
I'd add that, where I live (New England), furnace failures can be basically catastrophic so any theoretical convenience advantages just aren't worth it.
Wireless thermostats are really common in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere. I'm interested how they pair (like Bluetooth) with the boiler.
Basically, the thermostat is in a living area and you set the temperature(s) to what you want, it senses them, and then talks to the boiler (in my case in the roof-space) to heat up (or not, via radio) the water in the radiators to satisfy that. It's a feedback loop.
I'm maybe just a fuddy duddy but relying on wireless tech for critical systems unnecessarily seems like asking for trouble. Running wires to a boiler isn't generally that complicated and it's just one less point of failure.
That depends. Sometimes because they have encryption. It isn't hard to have shared keys of some sort. If there is no internet connection on the link (which is possible - I've never seen where both systems connect to wifi, but if they do worry!), and so you don't have to worry about malicious hackers and in turn the encryption is good enough even if done somewhat wrong.
Sometimes they are just send a radio signal and hope nobody else in range is using that frequency.
So again, there are too many different ways this is done to guess. Unfortunately they probably don't put this in the manual.
I have a weather station that takes two 1.2 V. The LCD screen is a bit dim compared to when used with fresh 1.5 V alkalines. Other than that, most things take the 1.2 V well. But they better do because alkalines reach 1.2 V with >50% capacity left.
Yeah, most of the devices using 9V are smoke/CO detectors which only accept alkalines. I don't use the few remaining 9V devices enough to justify buying a new charger.
A weird flipside is things like... the IKEA Zigbee devices. Many of these do not work right at all with 1.5V batteries and basically require rechargables.
> nodes/proxy GET allows command execution when using a connection protocol such as WebSockets. This is due to the Kubelet making authorization decisions based on the initial WebSocket handshake’s request without verifying CREATE permissions are present for the Kubelet’s /exec endpoint requiring different permissions depending solely on the connection protocol.
reply