This happened to me at work. I was talking to the chief engineer, and he handed me one of the products he was working on.

Thinking it probably was worth $100,000 I asked how much it was worth. He said “Oh about a million dollars”

Then why’d you hand it to me?!

It’s cool but holy moly!

Sure, but he was the very first person to ever fly in space so that definitely counts for something. Additionally, he could control the spacecraft if there was an emergency.

I had read that Francis appointed 80% of the Cardinals who pick the new Pope. So it’s possible that the new Pope will have similar views to Francis.

For anyone like me whose bullshit detector calibration is off from the past 10 years of crazy, this is indeed a real tweet from the official White House Twitter account.

Well it kinda depends. If criticizing the government could get you disappeared, then yeah, it’s logical for your parents to discourage that so they don’t lose you. It’s possible that they lost someone in your old country because of that and they don’t want to have that happen again.

On the other hand, if your new country has freedom of speech enshrined in law (and that law seems to be followed) then yeah, it would be silly not to criticize if you have criticisms.

Your mom has a point, focusing on things you cannot control might not be the best use of your time. If you disagree, then that’s fine, that’s your decision. I know that personally, I can get fixated on politics which will make me depressed, anxious, and overall shitty feeling. I need to carefully balance awareness/protest and what I can reasonably hope to achieve with my general quality of life.

Well, a group backed by Leonard Leo and the Koch brothers sued Trump because of tariffs. I’d say that’s giving a bit of a shit.

These goons run companies who are notorious for only caring about this quarter’s profits. If they see profits drop because of bullshit tariffs, that’s going to hurt them today. And any benefits, if they ever appear, will take years to show up, so they’re not worth supporting.

He doesn’t understand anything. Here’s what he said about income taxes and tariffs today.

They established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government

I mean, I was harassed to enlist despite actively going to college (officers usually get a commission after college), despite repeatedly telling them I was not interested and never taking the test.

No, it’s half the tariff those countries place on American goods. Or so he claims. I have no idea where those numbers come from.

It’s a 3 hour aptitude test. Are you good at math? Are you good at electronics? Etc. I would imagine it’s a minor speed bump to joining the military.

According to this article, project 2025 doesn’t do that. It proposes requiring students to take the military ASVAB test. Which honestly isn’t the worst idea. In my high school they recommended people who didn’t know what they wanted to do for a career to take it even if they weren’t going into the military.

I’ve found Linux Mint to be easier to install and use than Windows. (I don’t have to enter the console and allow myself to setup an offline account because no network drivers were working in Linux. Windows 11 did that).

I’ve never had issues with graphics drivers, despite using Nvidia cards. The only issues with Linux have been because I broke something when I was messing around.

Get a USB drive, burn a Linux ISO to it, and try it out without installing it.

I tried one of those alternatives once. It was like chewing on gristle. The flavor went away within seconds. I’d rather eat glue. Hopefully they’ll improve, but I’m not optimistic.

When I build my NAS/server last year, I bought a used Dell Optiplex from 2013 on eBay for $50. I tossed in an old SSD I had laying around, and squeezed in 42 TB worth of HDD drives. I added a PCIE SATA expansion card, and a 10 gig network card for 60 bucks to improve performance.

The only real downsides of doing it this way are

• No realistic way of upgrading hardware
• Limited space for internal drives
• No hardware transcoding abilities out of the box
• More power consumption than buying something newer

Gary?

Every few generations? The FDIC paid out for bank failures in 2008!

"Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure-grain alcohol Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation. Fluoridation of water? Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face?

I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"

– these goobers

I use Kopia to backup to Backblaze B2. I also use the Kopia UI since I can’t be bothered to figure out the cli for it. I have it running constantly in the background so it automatically takes care of everything.

I averaged data from 2016 to 2022. What am I cherry picking?

Airplanes aren’t as safe as trains!

In the US, air travel is safer by an order of magnitude. According to the National Safety Council, scheduled airlines have a passenger fatality rate per 100,000,000 miles of 0.001 while rail has a fatality rate of 0.025. Hell, busses are safer with a fatality rate of 0.0066.

I’m sure rail safety is probably better in Europe and Japan since they have better rail infrastructure and more passengers.

A /r/dataisbeautiful post from several years ago also shows a similar story.