A quick glance at amazon.co.uk shows high-wattage induction cooktops that are relatively cheap, e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/GIONIEN-Domino-Induction-Hob-Electr... is a dual-burner 3500W model that takes 220V-240V (unclear if it's ok on 208V?) for £109.99 (USD$143). 60 Hz would be a leap of faith, but is probably fine.
Then we're back to having to upgrade an outlet in my house and wire it into the panel, which would cost $400 at least. And the only thing I'm getting for that price is more wattage, but not finer control over the temperature, so I'll stick to my current setup.
Bike parking requirements are generally part of zoning, not building codes, and generally apply only to new construction, not existing buildings. That appears to be true in Chicago: https://chicagocode.org/17-10-0300/
It's good that it was helpful in convincing the building superintendent to support bicycles, but probably not so great if that's not actually what the law requires. (Perhaps your building was recently constructed and the Chicago Building department or Zoning Administrator failed to enforce the zoning code?)
I'm familiar with how zoning works. Buildings in Chicago are required to meet the code for when they were built, or the current code. The building manager tried to get away with breaking the laws a number of other times, but the bike parking issue was the easiest example.
The building has a parking lot that was constructed to meet the current code, but bicycle parking was not added. Furthermore, the rack the building manager purchased to comply with the law was not a type allowed by the Chicago Department of Transportation, the entity responsible for determining which racks comply with the zoning law. Finally, the guy dropped the rack in the striped area of the ADA parking zone and didn't secure it to anything, which is also illegal.
For an example of a time he clearly violated the law, he replaced our windows with ones that couldn't open, but insisted that he could only run the mechanical ventilation from 9 AM to 5 PM despite the building being occupied well outside of these hours. When he was called out on this fact, he tried to hide behind the noise ordinance, which has a specific exception for mechanical ventilation. He also tried to claim that we "chose" to be in the building while the ventilation was off, so ventilation didn't need to be provided, which is also false. No matter which year was chosen for the code, the building would not be allowed to be occupied without ventilation under any building code.
Being able to look up the relevant ordinance on the internet and send him the link was extremely helpful. Furthermore, it made it a lot easier to find who was responsible for enforcing a particular area of the code, and then explain what law was being broken to them. Without the code online, I'm rather sure I'd have to hire a lawyer to get anything done. The city tends to respond to problems based on the length of time they will take to solve, and being able to contact the right department with the exact issue at hand speed up the process immensely. I can't even imagine how either the bike rack issue or the ventilation issue would have taken if I had to call 311 and try to get the phone number to the correct department. I once got a call back for some illegal dumping I reported two years after I had moved out of the apartment I was reporting the issue from.
People like that will do anything. I lived in a building where due to some bizarre dispute with the city, the landlord removed the front door.
He had a section 8 tenant, and section 8 requires that anything in the home be in good order. The door locks didn't work correctly, and that tenant reported him. He believed that removing the door would solve his problem, as a door that is missing is not broken.
I ultimately escaped paying a few months rent when he was arrested for trying to set another building on fire.
Landlords are by definition rent-seekers peddling a highly constrained resource. At scale they tend to self-organize into local cartel business models, and thus trend towards the asshole side of the behavioral spectrum.
Many years ago, when I was designing a part in AutoCad, I drew it by hand and then back-converted the drawing into parametrized AutoLISP, which I then stored under version control (RCS at the time).
It'd be nice to have tools that make this easy. Though I'm honestly surprised more people don't do it anyhow.
You can version AutoLISP but the output is so verbose (at least for machine generated code) that diffing versions is like diffing PDFs or PCL files. You can see the changes but they don't make any sense without the whole file being rendered.
NOTE: Its been 20 years since I used AutoLISP and the code I was using was being generated from software that did cut-plan optimization for lathes so I am probably speaking from a very old/ignorant point of view.
With AutoCad or any software that exports DXF or IGES, Git or other version control would work fine. Nemetscheck VectorWorks wil export a design file as VectorScript [a super-set of Pascal].
I'm really unconvinced that this continues to be a current problem, and the Wikipedia article is definitely not clear on this. If there are recent examples of this that are clearly documented, it would be great to see some good hard data or sourcing, either here or perhaps the Wikipedia article's talk page.
The estimate of 2007 being the end of it assumes the devices were plugged in and being used the whole time, right? I still see bad caps happen at some of our clients, but they are old machines that aren't powered on all the time...
Not $50, but still.