If you can handle putting the nozzle on your garden hose, you should be able to handle it.
In the US, the water pipe almost always connects to the toilet through a small shutoff valve. After the valve, it connects to the toilet through a "supply." The supply is basically a short garden hose, with screw-on connections at both ends.
Shut off the water at the wall.
Flush to empty the toilet tank.
Unscrew the hose at the toilet, and screw that end into what amounts to a y, or splitter that comes with the bidet.
From the splitter, screw one side back into the toilet connection; the other goes to the bidet itself.
Turn back on the water at the wall.
(This is for a simple cold-water bidet. If you need heated water or electricity, it can be more complex.)
I mean, but don't you need warm water and/or electricity? I can't see liking a bidet if it's basically just cold tap water shooting up my bum. Not sure that's going to do it for me.
I've always thought that both hot water and electricity would be a minimal barrier to entry for a bidet. And that neither of these exist in a typical toilet closet. Am I fundamentally wrong about this??
Whether you need it probably depends on your climate and your house.
Water in pipes inside a house's "thermal envelope" is presumably around 72 deg. F. I wash my hands with "cold water" without wincing. Tap water strikes me as tepid if I drink it without ice.
If your pipes run through an outside wall in Canada, it might be a different story.
If you do need warmer water, and the bidet heats it, you probably just need an electrician to fish a wire and add a receptacle. That's not outrageously complex, usually, but I tend toward calling a professional for anything behind the walls.
> Water in pipes inside a house's "thermal envelope" is presumably around 72 deg. F.
The pipes in my house are in the crawlspace underneath the house, which is definitely nothing like 72F this time of year. Any hot water more than 10 feet or so away from the water heater runs pretty cold for several gallons.
That sounds like a good weekend project, putting split foam insulation around your pipes. 8' runs are a couple of bucks at the big box stores.
It's not quite as efficient, but I put in a recirculation pump and a timer to keep the water warm throughout the pipe during the day. The clothes washer was never getting warm water, and we wasted a lot at the shower waiting for warm water to reach it.
Yes, but the theorem is meant to explain what can happen in the universe over long time scales.
The point is that there isn't enough time in the universe for all the random stuff to happen that scientists pin on random chance. The theorem was memorable, but a cop out.
> Yes, but the theorem is meant to explain what can happen in the universe over long time scales.
I never understood it that way. I always interpreted it as a fun way to explain the mathematical truth that no matter how low a probability is, as long as it is technically above 0, the event it describes WILL eventually occur given enough time/trials/etc.
I can't see anybody ever interpreting it as a statement about the real, actual, universe. Just like I don't think anybody truly believes that flipping a real coin with non-identical sides (such as every currency coin I've ever used) must have EXACTLY 50% probability of landing on either side. Surely people can separate the mathematical ideal/concept from constraints of physical reality.
> Just like I don't think anybody truly believes that flipping a real coin with non-identical sides (such as every currency coin I've ever used) must have EXACTLY 50% probability of landing on either side.
That's a nice thought, but that's giving the average person too much credit when it comes to probability. In my experience, most people's understanding of probability is very poor. For example, few people truly understand the concept of independent events.
Most people believe that after flipping 10 heads in a row, the probability of tails on the next flip is much higher.
I'm sure you could convince a rational individual that the assymetry of the coin makes 50/50 impossible. But I doubt that the average person has ever really considered it.
> the event it describes WILL eventually occur given enough time/trials/etc.
What's the meaning of writing WILL with capitals, and then saying "nobody is talking about the real, actual universe"? What is the value of certainty about what WILL happen in hypothetical universes?
> What is the value of certainty about what WILL happen in hypothetical universes?
Talking about something that would take greater than 1 googol years in our universe has about as much value as talking about something that would take 1 googol years in our universe.
In other words, the fact that something might probably occur right before the heat death of the universe, rather than after, isn't particularly useful either. For that matter, there's about an equal value in talking about something probably "only" a trillion years out, either.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the infinite monkey example outside of theoretical mathematics; I'm sure someone has, but when I've heard it, it was to describe regular distribution of random.
I think it's a very bizarre thing for these mathematicians to act like they discovered something that I don't think anyone really disputed.
Perhaps not in our observable universe, but in the space of all possible physics that could take place and / or beyond the observable universe if it actually is infinitely big there, perhaps it can? (as in, anything can happen, there will be copies of the Earth with subtle differences somewhere there, Boltzmann brains appearing purely out of quantum fluctuations, etc...)
She doth protest too much. A major purpose of education is connecting the past and the present. There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024.
And yet she seems resigned to students maintaining “dialects” that make it difficult to talk to grandparents, and impossible to read the “old white men,” while she cites the phone as a reason:
> Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read. While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.
It's almost as if there are beautiful, deep lessons being passed down by people who lived before us.
I find the authors argument unpersuasive. I was one of those rebellious teenagers growing up and it was exactly in Dostoyevsky and Arthur Koestler and Umberto Eco that I found refuge and companionship. Maybe because they were so different than me and my peers, they offered me a glimpse into different ways of thinking and seeing.
> There will always be slang, but without a “lingua Franca,” you’re not going to make the connection between 1776 and 2024.
It’s this very connection that is at question, however. There is an explicit ideological agenda explicitly focused on severing this connection. The types of people who complain that classic literature was written by “old white men” have never been coy about it.
They originally scored against a test usually taken by people who failed the bar.
So, GPT-4 scores closer to the bottom of people who pass the bar the first time. In other words, it matches the people who cull the rules from texts already written, but who cannot apply it imaginatively.
If you can recite the black letter law, you've got a good chance of passing the bar. The higher essay scores usually require creative arguments about resolving competing rules and policies.
It's easier to extract the formal statement of the rule against perpetuities from a reddit corpus, than to apply the rule to an artificially complex fact pattern in an essay question.
A ridiculous transaction cost by modern standards, especially when multiplied by all HM's various enterprises.
Except this kind of work spawned a nation of clerks and it has lasted a thousand years. Everybody has to think about the King's values, and implement them in their own little corner of the kingdom.
If Joe Biden changes his heraldry, it doesn't change my post office experience one whit.
I'm not sure what the costs of this will be, but it'll be tiny on the scale of things. It's all done by GDS in-house, and the design is shared across every government site and app. Before GDS, there were constant rebranding projects across every corner of the government and civil service. Now this is done with one update to a shared design system.
Not on the same magnitude of cost but each time there's a new president, portraits in military installations and government offices are updated. Many states have their governor on their welcome signs on roads and at airports. Some cities even do it for their mayor. At least with the Monarchy, it's not a routine expense like it is with frequent elections.
> Not on the same magnitude of cost but each time there's a new president, portraits in military installations and government offices are updated.
Chain-of-command portraits serve a practical, if minor, function; yes, more of them change when a chief executive changes than anyone else, but they also change when a batallion commander or civilian agency director changes, for the same reason as for a chief executive.
Heraldry of the monarch also serve a function, I suppose, but it is less like a chain of command photograph and more like the US national coat of arms (or the Great Seal, which has the former on the obverse); neither of which has changed substantially (there have been some rendering tweaks) since adopted by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation in 1782.
> Chain-of-command portraits serve a practical, if minor, function
And that function is that (for example) on a big Navy ship with thousands of sailors, the "lower ranks" might never have laid eyes on the commanding officer ("CO") or executive officer ("XO") but need to recognize him/her if s/he shows up unannounced and alone in a workspace — following the old nuclear-Navy rule that "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect."
As you say, most of those aren't a big deal, except in Chicago. The Daleys started putting their name on EVERYTHING; it's always strange to visit from out of town and see it so branded.
Well while we’re discussing needless costs associated with changes in leadership shall we talk about those hilariously over the top inaugurations you have every four years?
That's really unconcerning compared to the bulk of political spending. Also, the money spent on inaugurations is easily trackable; it comes out of a general fund. Absolutely pales in comparison to Congressional insider trading and stuff like Hunter Biden and Eric Trump do: making money off of implied considerations.
Well, Trump said there were a million people at his inauguration (I know, this was an absurd bald face lie). I don’t know how much it costs to rent, set up and take down that many chairs, but I’m going to guess it was more than three fifty.
At risk of picking nits: they don't put up a million chairs. I attended the 2012 inauguration and we all stood on the grass in the National Mall.
(I agree with your overall point though. There were speaker towers arranged at intervals down the mall and plenty of crowd control involved in getting people to and from the event in the first place, none of which had to have been cheap.)
The average reign of a British monarch has been 25 years or so, since 1707, sure. But that’s skewed by two major outliers - Victoria (63 years) and Elizabeth II (70 years). Between the other 11 unitary monarchs the average is more like 17 years. Shorter turnovers are possible - four kings lasted 10 years or less. Not sure you’d get great odds on Charles beating that spread.
Context: Japanese dates count years from the accession of the current emperor (Reiwa 1 = 2019, Reiwa 2 = 2020, etc), so when the emperor changes, you need to renumber basically everything.
Bonus: you also get confused foreigners who think "6/12/20" is 6 Dec 2020 or even 12 June 2020, instead of 20 Dec 2024 (Reiwa 6). Fortunately the Japanese themselves are ISO-compliant and always use YYMMDD.
When/if an emperor reigns for over 100 years, would they shorten the format as-per-iso shorthand rules? That is, would the year Reiwa 106 also be written as 6/12/20 ?
The specific problem here is that Charles has done less than zero to endear himself to the public. So far his most obvious interactions have all been "Look at me! I'm king now!"
For example - this silly little exercise. And his request that there should be portraits of him in school and public offices.
This will have been filtered through courtiers saying "I'm really not convinced that's a good idea, your majesty." So these public proofs of his kingness seems very important to him.
Meanwhile much of the country is starving or in debt, shops and businesses are closing, and infrastructure is crumbling.
I'm defending neither the institution of the monarchy nor Charles as a person, but this particular exercise is standard, not a whim of his. Each monarch has their own personal cypher, and has had for years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ZL7H7WCzM
And reflecting that cypher in the gov.uk branding was not Charles's choice.
At least in the military, it's commonplace for the entranceway to the offices/working spaces of any unit to have a board with the official photos of the entire chop chain, from the President on down to the unit commanding officer.
And in basic training or the initial parts of officer training, one of the things people can be inspected on is having the names of everyone on that chain memorized. Not because that's something most military people routinely do, just to drive the point home of lawful orders and civilian control.
$1 in compensatory damages means the jury decided that yes it was technically defamation, but that it was literally the smallest, tiniest, itty-bittiest amount of defamation that is possible. That it did about the same amount of damage to the scientist's career and reputation, as if he'd ordered delivery and discovered a can of soda was missing.
The idea that you could do $1 of damage and your punishment is $1,000,000 is just nonsensical. Either it did extensive damage to his career (years' worth of salary lost) and a million dollars is appropriate additional punishment, or it didn't and he wins a dollar because he was defamed but it did virtually no damage and the defendants merely have to pay his court costs or something.
It’s just an unfortunate fact pattern. Compensatory damages are by design supposed to be a quantifiable number that you can directly point to on a ledger somewhere. Mann claims to have lost grants, and indisputably lost reputation, but has remained employed at a seemingly proper level throughout his career. Scientists don’t get kickbacks from grants, so no quantifiable losses _to Mann_ there. Loss of reputation is hard to quantify, though it is sometimes done by having a PR expert testify “this is how much it would cost to restore a person’s reputation to its previous state”, but considering Mann’s previous state was “unknown to the public”, that’s also tough to do. IIRC, Mann has had to have private security at various points, but that was paid for by his employer, so Mann can’t be compensated for it. It seems like in the absence of hard numbers like that, the jury decided to compensate using punitive rather than trying to make up a number, and no party is allowed to tell the jury that that will get struck down.
What? It was my impression that scientists draw salary directly out of the grant, and that many scientists do not earn any salary other than what comes out of their grants.
So Mann's salary is whatever, call it $500k/year, paid for by Penn State. He brings in grants to perform research that justify to Penn State why it's worth it to pay him that $500k/year (e.g. a $5M grant will include some amount for the PI + research assistants, some amount of lab spend, some amount of overhead to Penn State). If that grant doesn't materialize, Penn State is still on the hook for that $500k.
That's why it was tricky for Mann to prove damages here - Penn State was likely harmed, but Penn State didn't sue.
You get a salary that can be paid from the grants, but if you get $1m or $20M in grants it's not going to be a change in your salary. At least until you negotiate a higher salary. And if you don't get the grants in the next cycle, the university will be paying your salary.
Isn't most reputational damage very hard to conclusively prove for normal people?
If someone posts all over Twitter that I'm a fraudster and an asshole, and I feel like I'm having fewer prospective customers choose me to tile their bathroom and I'm getting fewer dates on Grindr - am I supposed to be able to prove that, and the causality in court?
Even if I somehow have detailed records of exactly how all of my dates have gone and how many prospective clients I've given quotes to - maybe there's just another tile guy who started asking for less, and I'm getting fewer dates because I got this garish pink mohawk.
It may seem counterintuitive, but reputation damages are "actual" damages.
Yes, they are hard to prove, but the jury gets to take that into account. It could have picked almost any number ($1m, $10m, etc.) for reputation damages, but that would go in the "actual" damages line on the form.
The "punitive" damages really are just to discourage future bad conduct. And it will be difficult to support the idea that it takes a $1m penalty to prevent future bad conduct worth $1.
The legal situation notwithstanding I actually kinda agree with this. You have to pay $1e6 in punitive damages because you were actively trying to defame him and we want you to be sufficiently disincentivized from trying it again. But since you failed so spectacularly and didn't do any actual harm to him personally or his career here's $1 actual of damages.
Can you imagine if firing a gun into a crowd was only illegal if you actually hit someone? I think you have to take intent into account and here it's so blatantly purposeful.
No, because this is a civil suit, not a criminal one.
In a criminal one you are correct -- if you try to rob a bank and try but fail to kill a bunch of hostages, you're still going to jail for possibly the rest of your life.
But in a civil trial, the main point is the damages. Yes there can be a punitive element on top, but only if there are damages in the first place. If you attempt something bad but don't succeed, a civil suit can't punish you. It's not like a criminal trial.
This is why I said the legal situation notwithstanding. I know this is how it works but I think it's nonsensical. The existence of punitive damages already throws out the idea that civil suits are just about real measured harm and includes the state overlaying elements of criminality on top of civil suits to punish wrongdoing. To me the only consistent stances are either not having punitive damages at all and accounting for intangibles directly in the real damages or having punitive damages that are totally orthogonal to the real harm. And just like criminal cases we can account for attempted X being less severe than X.
> The existence of punitive damages already throws out the idea that civil suits are just about real measured harm and includes the state overlaying elements of criminality on top of civil suits to punish wrongdoing.
No, it has nothing to do with elements of criminality.
It's the simple fact that if civil actions resulted in only restitution and nothing more, then everybody would be committing torts whenever they could, because sometimes you'll get away with it and sometimes you won't, but statistically you'll always come out ahead. Because sometimes people don't bring charges, sometimes they're too hard to prove, etc.
So the additional punishment is a way to correct that, to ensure that civil suits still function as deterrence. To ensure that if we only count the suits successfully brought and prosecuted, the tort-committer will still lose overall in the end.
There's nothing to do with criminality here, which is prosecuted by the state rather than by a private party.
> So the additional punishment is a way to correct that, to ensure that civil suits still function as deterrence
That's exactly what I mean by elements of criminality. You're not just saying that you harmed someone and have to make them whole but also that you did something wrong and have to be punished so you won't do it again. It's a fine by another name.
> Can you imagine if firing a gun into a crowd was only illegal if you actually hit someone?
Yes, there is typically differences in law between reckless endangerment, manslaughter, premeditated murder, hate crime additions, etc.
If one were to balance benefit/harm, if the jury found that the would-be defamers benefited Mann personally and professionally in the manner of the "Streisand Effect," would Mann need to pay them?
By my reading you're agreeing with me. Attempting murder is also a crime where here there isn't really "attempted defamation" despite the actions and intent of the would-be defamer being identical. If you believe any part of the justice system is supposed to act as a deterrent then sincerely trying and failing to harm someone else is an act worthy of punishment. You might argue that punitive damages ought to be collected by the state or destroyed but regardless their function is identical.
I don’t agree and not agree, just exploring the idea. I think the deterrent part of a justice system is to deter the person harmed from initiating or continuing a cycle of retribution that reduces civilization to ruin. If it could be a deterrent for people who do wrong, then it does a bad job of it. In reality the wrongs and rights people do are not their own, just random happenstance that configured a person to be in the position to act in a certain way at a certain time.
In the US, the water pipe almost always connects to the toilet through a small shutoff valve. After the valve, it connects to the toilet through a "supply." The supply is basically a short garden hose, with screw-on connections at both ends.
Shut off the water at the wall. Flush to empty the toilet tank. Unscrew the hose at the toilet, and screw that end into what amounts to a y, or splitter that comes with the bidet. From the splitter, screw one side back into the toilet connection; the other goes to the bidet itself. Turn back on the water at the wall.
(This is for a simple cold-water bidet. If you need heated water or electricity, it can be more complex.)
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