tburkhol @ tburkhol @lemmy.world

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605

Joined

2 yr. ago

D.C. isn't a state, and capitol police are Federal officers. It's a legally weird place.

His district was 65-35, so not very purple.

What's any of that have to do with knowing that 9/11 happened? Standing on the Arizona Memorial, asking "What's this all about?" isn't asking for a dissertation on US-Japan relations, or nuances of 1940s US politics. It's asking why there's a big white building in the middle of the bay.

Donald Trump was born 13 months after the end of WWII in Europe. 9 months after the fall of Japan. WWII isn't "history" for him: he should know as much about Pearl Harbor as you do about 9/11.

The sycophantic media must be so sick of desperately trying to sanewash whatever salad issues from Trump's face that Musk, however dishonest and wrong, is like a swimming pool bar after 40 years in the desert.

That's my point: fusion is just another heat source for making steam, and with these experimental reactors, they can't be sure how much or for how long they will generate heat. Probably not even sure what a good geometry for transferring energy from the reaction mass to the water. You can't build a turbine for a system that's only going to run 20 minutes every three years, and you can't replace that turbine just because the next test will have ten times the output.

I mean, you could, but it would be stupid.

If you're not sure how the fire works, it seems kind of stupid to build a turbine for it.

Solar is definitely not a panacea. Near as I can tell, no 'green' alternative is - they really depend on making use of local conditions and resources in ways that are not compatible with late-stage production-line capitalism.

In my area (US southeast), between weather and tilt-of-earth, the solar models predict about half as much annual energy as an identical installation in California or Arizona. Tack on that our electric rate is also about half California, and rooftop solar is a pretty iffy proposal.

Wind might be better here, if there were any residential/suburban options. Hydro, if you happen to live on a stream. Basically, the useful local resources all require massive scale to utilize, and nobody wants to do that when gas is cheap.

It's like an iPad, but has to be plugged into the wall all the time. Rarely has a touch screen, so the only way to make it do stuff is with an external mouse and keyboard. Super useless.

I've always understood 2 as 2 physically different media - i.e., copies in different folders or partitions of the same disk is not enough to protect against failure of that disk, but a copy on a different disk does. Ideally 2 physically different systems, so failure/fire in the primary system won't corrupt/damage the backup.

Used to be that HDDs were expensive and using them as backup media would have been economically crazy, so most systems evolved backup media to be slower and cheaper. The main thing is that having /home/user/critical, /home/user/critical-backup, and /home/user/critical-backup2 satisfies 3 copies, but not 2 media.

3: RAID-1 pair + manual periodic sync to an external HD, roughly monthly. Databases synced to cloud.

2: external HD is unplugged when not syncing

1: External HD is a rotating pair, swapped in a bank box, roughly quarterly. Bank box costs $45/year.

If the RAID crashes, I lose at most a month. If the house burns down, I lose at most 3 months. Ransomware, unless it's really stealthy, I lose 3 months. If I had ongoing development projects, a month (or 3) would be a lot to lose, and I'd probably switch to weekly syncs and monthly swaps, but for what I actually do - media files, financial and smart-home data, 3 months would not be impossible to recreate.

All of this works because my system is small enough to fit on one HDD. A 3-2-1 system for tens of TB starts to look a lot like an enterprise system.

The US VP went to NATO and said, "NATO was great when we shared democratic values; now that we're focusing on xenophobic nationalism and cultural purity, NATO is not our style." The old East-West world balance has been teetering for years, and now it's time we all go to war again.

Of the 5 current US reps with DSA history, DSA only endorsed 1 in 2024. They don't even support AOC anymore. Maybe they've just refocused their efforts on state level races - which are definitely more 'winnable' and definitely an important part of building a pipeline to national office - but far less visible to people who don't live in any targeted districts. To my view, they're not the national joke that the Green party is, but they're much harder to see than they were six years ago.

Democratic Socialists had a pretty serious recruiting campaign for the 2018 midterms. Cold-called potential candidates, offered training for both speechifying and organizing. Put up actual progressive candidates against incumbent dems in carefully chosen districts. That's where "The Squad" came from.

Then they just kind of disappeared.

My point is that there are people out there willing to step up, but probably not thinking that they could be a "real" candidate and win, put up with the hassle and harrasment. People who would answer if called, but aren't ready to jump in unasked. Bernie's asking.

Yup.

Listen, I understand that numbers are scary, but the difference between 'ordinary rich' and 'problematic rich' is entirely in the numbers. I've probably got 10x as much cash in bank as you, but I'm not rich. My grandma, retired with a paid-off house and a bit of 401k, probably - technically - a millionaire, but still not rich. Billionaire who gets stopped for speeding or DUI can drop $100,000 on lawyers, the way I might drop a penny in the Take-a-penny dish, not just fighting his ticket but investigating and suing the PD that stopped him. That billionaire can pay a politician $1M for special treatment the way I might buy lunch.

Your grandma with $1M ain't problematic rich. Billionaire is problematic rich. The threshold is somewhere in between, and probably closer to $100M than $10M. Estate tax starts at $14M. Most of the proposals for wealth tax start somewhere around $50M.

$14M is almost exactly the top 1% of US households by wealth, around a million to million-and-a-half of them. There's only 750 billionaires. The billionaires are less than 0.1% of the US 1%.

$14M is plenty to live very comfortably, but it's little enough that you still have to consider costs of big purchases. You're not going to own a jet. You can have multiple houses as long as you keep them normal-sized. $14M is rich, but it's not Rich-rich.

I remember hearing the same thing about Covid.

Physical violence? Did I miss where the dude got dragged from his vehicle and beaten?

Go out in public proudly displaying political symbols, and you should expect people to answer back with a yell or a finger. A sticker about how your car sucks. Maybe even a blast of coal-rolling exhaust. Words invite words; symbols invite symbols - no one's throwing hands, so I'd say this is just about how I'd like culture war to work.

Proton is only encrypted between proton users. Proton mail to/from gmail or outlook is plain text, unless the recipient sets up PGP, and you can do E2EE with PGP over any host.

I have 8 Z-wave devices now, including a couple "long range" devices. With the first couple, I would sometimes have trouble with the farthest, battery-powered device dropping out of the network occasionally, but that hasn't happened as I've added more devices. I fought with pairing the initial devices - clicking the right series of buttons at the same time as telling HA to look for devices to join - but all the recent devices have just has a QR code - scan it into HA, and the device just shows up when I turn it on. I don't know how much of this difference between new and old is my learning curve vs better product support, but I am really happy with my Z-waves now.

Z-wave rather than wifi so I know they aren't phoning home.