That exact table is in my dining room right now.

I vaguely remember the Bicentennial. The special quarters. Parades & fireworks. I know it was in the wake of Vietnam, and I remember MIA flags. I know it was in the middle of the Carter-Ford campaign, but I don’t remember it being a Republicans-only kind of thing. Maybe I was just young and naive.

I assume ‘disillusioned with the Democrat party’ after 2008 means the bank bailouts and lack of prosecution. Conservative brain is generally ok with businesses fucking the economy over, but they expect (at least ideologically) that companies will fail when that happens. Not their company, but nebulous companies that don’t employ them or their friends.

TBH, I would have liked to see a lot more fraud cases come out of 2008. I would have liked to see banks get ‘right sized’ so there’s no more “too big to fail.”

I don’t understand all the negativity towards folks like this.

Skepticism whether they’ve “changed their ways” or just rejected the one person who hurt them.

These are people who were totally down with draining the swamp of all its career politicians and bureaucrats, right up until they were the bureaucrat being drained. They were down with storming the Capitol so only real American votes would be counted. Article bravely stays away from racism. The whole “be a conservative like everyone else” and “vote for Trump like everyone else” vibe suggests they’ll be ready to vote for the next demagogue who promises them easy solutions to intractable problems.

There’s no indication in the text that they have suddenly discovered empathy, only that they’ve learned small government policies cost them their government job. Maybe that’s just the way the article was written, but I don’t think empathy is something one just discovers at middle age.

Had a friend training for Iron Man. He’d do like 15 mile bike in to work (and back), 5 mile run at lunch, and swim in the evening. Dude would eat sticks of butter straight out of the refrigerator for lunch. I couldn’t watch.

Think she’ll be eligible for any of that $1.8B ‘weaponized prosecution’ fund?

Not who you replied ti, but I’ve been on purelymail for about a year and a half. No complaints. $10.yr is great, and their billing statements claim I could be around $3/year if I switched to their advanced billing. I have nagging concern that they’re hosted on AWS, and if your goal is to completely free yourself of US tech giants, then purelymail won’t.

Yes, but also I don’t think the Democrats have any stronger candidate to run against Republicans.

This is a real problem. Who’s in the national Democratic pipeline? Biden kind of sucked the life out of anyone associated with him - Anthony Blinken? Lloyd Austin? Pete Buttigeig was the closest thing Biden had to an attack dog, but he keeps losing elections and I don’t know what he’s doing now. I thought Katie Porter was cool for a while, but she blew her run for senate and is currently choking on a run for governor of California. Bernie’s too old.

I don’t even know who else is out there.

If you want the real answer…

Yeah, Orwell had the clarity of fighting against a literal right wing coup. A clear, decisive event to separate the non-violent time from the violent time, and violence instigated by people without even nominal consent of The People.

The slow rise of militancy, matched with spreading desperation, at least so far lacks a trigger. And in the particular case of the US, we have, like, 30 shootings a day just being us. That makes it a lot less shocking when a couple of those are government shootings. We let the right wingers take over the government (arguably, 250 years ago), and they’re just slowly boiling the frog.

I believe Orwell was speaking of the Spanish Revolution (1936), in which he fought on the side of the socialists.

Pacifism is a great ideal, and (I believe) a lot of conflicts can be solved by honest negotiation. Once the shooting starts, though, the time for pacifism has ended. In the US, right now, it’s not clear whether the shooting has started. I mean: ICE is definitely shooting people; people are definitely being injured and dying as result of the administration’s actions, but it’s not Shooting-shooting, and it still seems like avoidable, poor-policy harms. The question is: will it escalate to civil war level violence? And if it does, will strict pacifists already have blocked any hope of resistance?

.63W: N100 server with 2 HDD & 2 SSD. Cable modem. 5-port POE switch. WAP. Ooma VOIP device.

The POE & WAP are like 10W between them, but I had to add them to get strong enough wifi to one particular client. Authentik somehow consumes 3W. Immich also has a high idle load, so I leave it down most of the time.

At least my provider, when they need to build a new plant or do capacity upgrades, they get the PSC to give them blanket increases in service charge or kWh-rate, on the basis that everybody contributes to the higher demand. Now we’ve got single customers claiming they want the full output of two or three power plants, and why should I pay the mortgage on those plants for 20 years? When the data center will be gone in 5?

It’s way more complicated to build a GW-scale power plant than a GW-scale data center, mostly because the power plant is subject to environmental studies, fuel supply, etc, so a DC looking for investors that can just say they’re going to build a big warehouse, fill it with computers, and get electricity, magically, from the local utility, gets to outsource the hardest problem, and stands a better chance of getting their funding (regardless of whether they actually build anything).

I forget where I keep seeing that some huge fraction of proposed DCs will/are never built, suggesting that many of them are just investor scams. Showing their work on power supply would (presumably) make the scam harder to run.

Must be a new thing. My 20-year-old BR drive has never complained.

makemkv on linux for DVDs. abcde for CDs. dd of=game.iso for games.

I used to have pretty good luck with mplayer -dumpstream for DVDs, but its success rate started dropping a few years ago and I switched to makemkv.

No magic firmware required.

Yeah, I started with a PCI (no e) card, but had to switch to USB when it got hard to find cheap motherboards with PCI slots. It’s an old setup :) Honestly amazed that they can fit the whole thing into a thumb-sized USB dongle, although I suppose it’s easier without the analog side.

I use a USB tuner like https://hauppauge.com/pages/products/data_dualhd.html and https://mythtv.org/ Has to be plugged into an external antenna, and it really helps for that antenna to be on the 2nd floor, in a window, with clear view unobstructed by aluminum siding.

tvheadend.org or HDhomerun are probably more general solutions.

You might think that ordering cases of canned tomatoes, or a 10-year supply of rubber gloves are poor management decisions, but that’s because this AI is playing seven dimensional chess against your tic-tac-toe. Just wait until it’s cornered the tomato market, and then you’ll see.

What I don’t get is: why? I mean, this independent is clearly going to caucus with the Dems in Washington, so he’ll “count” as a Democrat. He’s clearly got the support of the Democratic party leadership. He appears to be a Democrat in all but name, and the only thing I can think is it’s to avoid reflexive hatred of the (D) in deep red Nebraska. Run a democrat as an independent, in the same way the GOP tried to run a candidate as a Dem.