Back in the day, I set up a little cluster to run compute jobs. Configured some spare boxes to netboot off the head-node, figured out PBS (dunno what the trendy scheduler is these days), etc. Worked well enough for my use case - a bunch of individually light simulations with a wide array of starting conditions - and I didn’t even have to have HDs for every system.

These days, with some smart switches, you could probably work up a system to power nodes on/off based on the scheduler demand.

Yup. Just going by the indexes, the stock market is down all the way to last summer. It’s been a precipitous and steady drop, but if you’re a true believer, it would be easy to say it’s just giving up a little bit of Trump bubble, hope it’s almost over, and relax. After all, they’ve still got their job or most of the stock market gains collected over the last 20 years, so their immediate personal conditions look great.

Apparently, one of the things that becomes really difficult as IQ drops even a little bit below 100 is hypothetical-conditionals. Like, “How would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast?” becomes, “But I did eat breakfast, and I feel fine.” So, looking at the economic disruption Trump’s causing, imagining that it could continue or get worse, and what that might mean for their personal situation can be a real, does-not-compute struggle.

If you’re already running Pihole, I’d look at other things to do with the Pi.

https://www.adafruit.com/ has a bunch of sensors you can plug into the Pi, python libraries to make them work, and pretty good documentation/examples to get started. If you know a little python, it’s pretty easy to set up a simple web server just to poll those sensors and report their current values. Only slightly more complicated to set up cron jobs to log data to a database and a web page to make graphs.

It’s pretty straightforward to put https://www.home-assistant.io/ in a docker on a Pi. If you have your own local sensors, it will keep track of them, but it can also track data from external sources, like weather & air quality. There a bunch of inexpensive smart plugs ($20-ish) that will let you turn stuff on/off on a schedule or in response to sensor data.

IMO, Pi isn’t great for transport-intensive services like radarr or jellyfin, but, with a Usb HD/SSD might be an option.

If you make it to Medicare age, it gets a lot less stressful. eg: my folks have had 4 knees replaced with very little out-of-pocket cost. There’s still supplemental insurance, but Medicare, not the profit-driven insurance company, determines what gets covered, and they mostly listen to doctors. There’s always edge cases, where some treatment might not be covered, but I feel like those are uncommon.

One way or the other, my ultimate health care plan is 9mm.

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

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.

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.

TY. Looks like the T6 is pro-only. Googling around, it looks like ventilation control may be one of the things that separate their pro-level T6/T10 from their DIY-level T5/T9. That’s disappointing.

It’s implicit. Biden is the one who invited all 25 million undocumented gang members into the country. Biden is the one who failed to renegotiate the 45th President’s disastrous Cal-Mex trade agreement. Trump’s bold new policies will fix decades of Democrat evil - you’ve made him hurt you. You deserve this, until you learn to behave.

Straight out of the domestic abuse handbook.

Does the Honeywell T6 give you separate control of temperature and fan? That is, can you turn air circulation on/off, even when the temperature wouldn’t trigger heating/cooling?

I’ve been watching pm2.5 in my house, and the HVAC filter does a pretty good job of keeping it down if I run the fan, but that fan takes a lot of energy, and I’d like to turn it off when the air is pretty clean.

Normal eggs are $4/doz for me, too. I see that box labeled ‘cage-free’ with ‘organic’ & ‘pasture raised’ nearby. Those are super bougie eggs, and I think they’re around $10/doz where I shop (and have been for years).

Next they’ll come for Mr. Ms. and Mrs.

You know, I just noticed: there’s no “r” in missus, so abbreviating it “Mrs” doesn’t really make sense. Maybe it’s supposed to be a possessive, like Mr’s, rather than an actual gender signifier.

I’m from a reasonably upper-middle class background; reasonably successful in a top-10 metro. So’s my brother, but he’s gone the McMansion & country club route where I’ve tended more modest. I don’t like visiting them. Their environment just rings all my class warfare buttons, triggers all my “you don’t belong here” warnings & the obsequiousness at the restaurants & venues they prefer is just gross. I mean, I’m a middle-aged white guy, dressed like all the other mf’s in the neighborhood, so I do “belong;” it just feels wrong.

Everybody gotta find their own comfort zone, and we have to appreciate that our friends & family can have different tastes. Sometimes, that does mean dressing up in funny costume & hanging out in uncomfortable spaces to share in their joy, but there’s tactful ways to explain/prepare your fam for unfamiliar situations, and there’s “Come here and let me dress you.”

It’s a short walk from “Mexico is sending us their criminals” to “We should send our criminals to Mexico.”

Even weirder when they start packing coffee in cocaine to throw off the dogs.

Every function the government fails to provide is an opportunity for people to pay for a commercial alternative. Where functioning countries provide national healthcare, Americans can pay private companies. Shutting down FEMA is an opportunity for companies to offer new kinds of disaster insurance, an opportunity for Trump-branded temporary housing, Trump-branded search & rescue. The list goes on.