I’ve watched enough Lock Picking Lawyer never to want a consumer ‘smart lock.’ Half of them can be opened with a magnet. Maybe commercial grade is better, but I’ve been locked out of my job after every power failure for the last 10 years, until someone comes along with a physical key.

Re homeassistant on a Pi: homeassistant does a lot of database transactions, so you may want to have db storage on something other than an SD card.

I switched from an I3-530, nominal TDP 73W, to an N-100, nominal TDP 7W, and power from the wall didn’t change at all. Even the i3 ran around 0.1 CPU load, except when transcoding, and I’m left with the impression that most of the power goes into HDDs, RAM, maybe fans, and PS losses. My sense is that the best way to decrease homelab power use is to minimize the number of devices. Start with your seyrver at 60W, add a WAP at 10-15W, maybe a switch at 10-15W… Not because of the CPUs, necessarily, but because every CPU every CPU comes with systems to keep the CPU going, keep the power regulated, etc.

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.

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.

I dunno, if Trump 2 treats student loans, and especially the Borrower Defense Loan Discharge program the way the Trump 1 administration did - blocking various ‘streamlining’ procedures, imposing a statute of limitations, and using the Secretary of Education’s discretionary powers to block, delay, and minimize repayments, then it will be a long time before they rack up Biden numbers.

My first server was a single-core Pentium - maybe even 486 - desktop I got from university surplus. That started a train of upgrading my server to the old desktop every 5-or-so years, which meant the server was typically 5-10 years old. The last system was pretty power-hungry, though, so the latest upgrade was an N100/16 GB/120 GB system SSD.

I have hopes that the N100 will last 10 years, but I’m at the point where it wouldn’t be awful to add a low-cost, low-power computer to my tech upgrade cycle. Old hardware is definitely a great way to start a self-hosting journey.

He’s paid Trump something like $3M/day. I’ll put up with a lot of shit for $3M.

Although, now I think about it, after I’ve collected a few hundred mil, that next $3M probably wouldn’t seem so compelling.

One of “Obamacare’s” selling points was to outlaw effectively-fake health insurance plans that were written upfront not to cover any actual care. Those policies had been around a lot longer than the mid-90s, but most employers were smart enough to avoid them, so they were really only a problem for poorer people buying individual insurance, and who cares about them?

My guess is that the old fake-insurance providers are the ones who figured out how to get around the ACA coverage requirements in ways that aren’t technically violations. Or figured out that no one was going to enforce penalties for those violations. Those practices have now crept into ‘mainstream’ providers, but it sure looks like no one cared until a CEO died.

Scabs understand that there’s a picket line and that they’re acting against fellow workers.

I don’t think the people being recruited for ‘jobs in the USA’ know very much about US domestic politics, visa structures, or the possibility that they’re being hired to replace layoffs. I would guess that most of them let the opportunity to get to the US, legally, and the hope that they can convert that to better status once there, outweighs all other considerations.

It’s not just religions drying up, it’s all of the old hierarchical social clubs. Their membership are aging and dying off, and they’re not doing anything to recruit Millennials or GenZ. The internet opened up vast opportunities for non-work social contact and relaxed the demand that people gather in one physical place at a fixed time with rules to minimize chaos.

Musk is definitely racist, and his support for H1B is a feature of that racism. He thinks “those orientals and Indians” are good at tech and “hardcore.” H1B lets him bring them over, treat them like slaves, and send them back home if they get uppity.

MAGAs would feel the same about immigrants in agriculture and hospitality, if they thought there was a reliable way to send them back home at the end of the workday.

Sure, but even if she had formally resigned, Texas would not have replaced her. TFA says her offices are abandoned, so likely no staff getting paid. She, herself may or may not be getting paid, but as near as I can tell, a congress person drawing 5 months of salary while being hospitalized out of DC is a pretty low level shitty-politician behavior. Besides, she’ll be collecting probably 80% of that salary as pension, anyway.

Yeah, this all seems relatively normal. Clickbait headline is definitely trying to imply that a serving Representative can just disappear into assisted living, where this woman systematically wrapped up her duties and stepped aside (if not down). Texas leaves election-year House vacancies to be filled by the election.

Why would the family not say where she is? Privacy. No one wants to advertise the medical status of family members.

Before the War, you want your bunker to be open and easily accessible, so you don’t have to go hunting for keys or struggle to remember a passphrase when the missiles come over the horizon. After the War, you want your valuables to be inside the bunker, so you can use your Tiffany broach to buy grain from the raiders. So, all your valuables need to be in the open bunker, but secure from pre-War thieves. Definitely need a vault in your vault.

Remember that Trump lies about everything, often in both directions. Everyone knows this, including his supporters. That gives his supporters the mental freedom to make up whateverthefuck policy positions they like and find proof that they are Trump’s real plan.

Donald Trump is the human version of a Bible. If you’re a Believer, god says he will implement your Desire. If you’re a Heretic, god says he will destroy the world. All with the same words.

It’s a little misleading to describe ‘feeling good,’ including selfless acts of altruism with the phrase “enrich themselves.”

They probably do not get the same tax cuts: a “normal” person, making a paltry $250,000/year only reduces taxes by 24% of their giving, where the ultra-rich get 37%.

But the real difference is scale. A million people each giving $100 to their favorite charity is going to distribute that money more-or-less according to the community’s overall priorities. One person giving $100M to their favorite charity has no connection to the broader community and social goals. They supercharge that one thing, which takes attention and resources from everything else.

4 - High-end philanthropy is subsidized by regular taxpayers.

I feel like this is really under-appreciated. Like, Rich Dude decides he wants to donate $100M to…whatever - early childhood education. In the US, he avoids up to $37M taxes, which you can either look at as other taxpayers making $37M matching donation or $37M taken from other society objectives.

To the extent that government is a (marginally) publicly accountable system for funding a society’s competing goals - education, health, defense, research - charity allows the very wealthy not just to bypass the social structure for prioritizing goals, but to force other taxpayers to adopt their personal priorities. Maybe the goal is good, maybe it’s not - the point is that they’re completely unaccountable.

Just being Devil’s Advocate here: Medicare fraud is a thing - docs who prescribe, or claim to have performed, unnecessary treatments, which may be as much as $60B (out of $900B spending, so…7-ish%). Maybe not enough to justify UHC’s 32% denial rate. And nobody seems to source their $60B or $100B fraud estimates - I can only find case evidence for a few hundred million, and those are cases spanning years.

1200 sf townhouse. I can clean it top to bottom under an hour. It takes 5 minutes to mow the lawn. Only time my electric bill tops $100 is August, and gas only in January. No one even thinks about you hosting family gatherings or parties. Don’t have to buy a monster TV so you can see it across the 20’ room.

I suppose, if you really like gardening, or hosting parties, then those could be negatives, but it seems like the main reason to have a big, fancy house is so other people know you can afford a big, fancy house. Personally, they make me uncomfortable, and I would hate to live in one, nevermind the maintenance.