Yay guess I get to do an Intel Arc build

Billy Mitchell can sue people all the live long day and win or lose it doesn’t make him less of a clown.

I mean, people already know. A tariff is literally a tax that artificially bouys one domestic industry or class of product, at the expense of all others who participate in the market.

I’ve never seen or heard of any point in history where the apparent “desired effect” is achieved and all manufacturing production is magically reshored resulting in prosperity. The actual result is Joe Consumer having fewer choices or buying a Chevy he didn’t want vs. a Toyota he did want.

… and while we are at it, what is an “American” car these days? Any company that was started or Headquartered here? Anything that undergoes final assembly here? The Ford I used to drive had parts and assemblies from Japan, Turkey, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, and probably China.

I used to do this when I was below 30 and it works pretty well for a time. If you work and have a family, this is the only segment of time you can carve into, to create more time for yourself.

One thing to be careful about though- there is growing evidence that not getting enough sleep earlier in your life like this can lead to dementia when you’re older.

This effort itself is more like a FEMA disaster preparedness set of tools for the public. Whether it’s power outages, bad weather, or actual war, the steps make each citizen less of a liability to the overwhelmed emergency responders. Having reserve water, backup communication, and a family plan is not “remilitarizing”, it is just common sense.

I recently vacationed in Germany and the immigration polizei agent asked me, in English, “what’s the purpose of your visit here?” and I said something like “Urlaub machen und Bier trinken, naturlich!” He applied the stamp and waved me through without incident.

So… Thanks for being cool, Germans!

I have awesome luck with this kinda thing. Was in Paris during a huge garbage strike a while back, and may be arriving in Germany during this.

Keeping an eye on this because it is a concerning trend

Yeah well assisted living with skilled nursing costs a fortune. Luckily most people only need that for 6 months to a year before they die anyway. I’m talking more like “55+ downsized housing” that doesn’t yet require a nurse, memory care, or any of that stuff.

I think for most Americans, they are considering it a win if their parents saved enough to retire and have their affairs in order. Just knowing you won’t have to do some bizarre financial trickery to handle your parents retirement housing and end of life care is a huge relief, to say nothing of having anything left over to inherit when they’re gone.

People don’t seem to understand the risks presented by normalizing client-side scanning on closed source devices. Think about how image recognition works. It scans image content locally and matches to keywords or tags, describing the person, objects, emotions, and other characteristics. Even the rudimentary open-source model on an immich deployment on a Raspberry Pi can process thousands of images and make all the contents searchable with alarming speed and accuracy.

So once similar image analysis is done on a phone locally, and pre-encryption, it is trivial for Apple or Google to use that for whatever purposes their use terms allow. Forget the iCloud encryption backdoor. The big tech players can already scan content on your device pre-encryption.

And just because someone does a traffic analysis of the process itself (safety core or mediaanalysisd or whatever) and shows it doesn’t directly phone home, doesn’t mean it is safe. The entire OS is closed source, and it needs only to backchannel small amounts of data in order to fuck you over.

Remember the original justification for clientside scanning from Apple was “detecting CSAM”. Well they backed away from that line of thinking but they kept all the client side scanning in iOS and Mac OS. It would be trivial for them to flag many other types of content and furnish that data to governments or third parties.

I love how the trend in tech seems to be to shift 100% of responsibility for professional development to the employee.

“Just get some certs on your own and build a homelab.”

Yeah, I have 2 degrees and a bunch of certs, of which many require CEU or renewal costs. Everytime I ask for professional development it’s “yeah there might be some budget for this one specific thing next quarter”.

Remember, when iPhones are off, they just become Airtags. Most modern phones are sending/receiving BLE signals even if you don’t expressly intend them to. I wouldn’t go anywhere near a protest with anything besides degoogled Android, because its the only OS where you can actually disable the radios. Even then I would probably opt for a Faraday bag.

Other considerations… Apple (and probably Google) devices are doing client side scanning of images and turning on GPS to geotag images unless you specifically disabled that features. In other words, there are ways you can be correlated to locations and activities after the fact. Just ask all those J6 rioters.

No idea, just said it because of the coupon reference.

Jo-Ann is Harbor Freight for Grandma

In many areas of the US, this just means both parents work and have solidly middle-class (but by no means extravagant) incomes. My wife and I both work and we can cover the mortgage, all the expenses related to our kid, home ownership expenses, modest savings, etc. We are certainly not buying luxury cars or Gucci bags. Our big spends involve housing, healthcare costs, food costs.

I’m not sure who these people are who are affording discretionary purchases of hobby related stuff and luxury goods. That’s probably more like the 1-2%. Either that or people are amassing debt so they can look the part and “keep up with the Joneses”.

As much as Harris claimed to like Venn diagrams, she didn’t seem to understand that “people who value Dick Cheney’s opinion” is a very small circle that doesn’t overlap at all with the “people who might consider voting for Kamala Harris” circle.

That’s not exactly true. While there is gun trafficking over the US southern border, the cartels have access to much larger orders of military hardware because they purchase firearms that “fell off the truck” from corrupt paramilitary orgs and security forces in central and South America.

You don’t need to piecemeal acquire semi-auto Glocks when you can get crates of full-auto AKs and ammo all in one go.

Honestly all of this bullshit is why I went with a Steamdeck a few years ago. As a working adult with a family I have different economic obligations and priorities.

I need to build a new PC soon (mine is now 10 years old) but I can’t justify spending $5K on a gaming rig. If I built now with a flagship card, just the card itself would cost more than I spent on my entire rig when I built it in 2014/2015. Pair that with Microsoft’s ridiculous operating system enshittification, and the PC situation gets even more complicated for me.

Consoles have gotten to be a bad value proposition for me as well. Paper launches, scalping during the pandemic, DRM etc., services going offline. All that garbage leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m having a decent enough time with Steam sale games, Indy games, and retro emulation.

They need to make an open source version of the Hitster card game that lets you use this to listen to the whole song (if you choose) whether you have a Spotify account or not.