For what it’s worth, I agree with you 100%. I’d love to see Musk fail in every one of his business endeavors, but if we’re going to drop space garbage over the planet, an uninhabited island seems like a great place to do it. The fact that a small group of people has superstitious ideas about that small patch of land should be irrelevant.

I can kind of get the logic behind this if you were an overseas call center. If you’re already based in the US, why lie? I can’t imagine why a call center would think being located in CA instead of OR would make the slightest difference.

I won’t deny the fact that gun violence happens here in the US, but statistics can be deceiving when you’re dealing with very small numbers. The article you linked gives a rate of 4.5 per 100,000 people in the US. That would put your country at around 0.13 per 100k.

Out of 100k, the difference between 4.5 and 0.13 is still exceptionally small. So small that your chances of being shot if you live here your entire life are negligible. If you visit for a week or two, your chances are statistically insignificant. If you look at homicides by any means, not just firearms, this becomes even closer.

So while what you say is accurate, you have to look at what it actually means. The United States is not “dangerous” by any stretch of the imagination. 35 multiplied by almost nothing is still almost nothing.

Personally, my problem was always that math concepts were never presented in a way that actually made sense in the “real world.”

I was taught that complex numbers were real numbers with imaginary parts that had something to do with the square root of -1. Yeah, I get it, but… why?

Fast forward a few decades and I’m writing code that processes a digitized waveform. Now it makes sense. Math isn’t hard when you have a frame of reference. Learning math concepts solely for the sake of learning them is very hard.

But why, though? Trump is a narcissist and Vance is his lapdog. Licking Putin’s boots shouldn’t feed his ego, so why do it? Maybe Putin has some dirt on him. Nobody is going to give a shit. His MAGAts are still going to rationalize why he’s their messiah and continue supporting him.

Calling him a Russian asset is giving him too much credit. He’s being mean to what he sees as the “little guy” because it makes him feel like a big man, and the rest of us have to live with the consequences.

I just don’t understand what the goal here is. It seems like everything this administration does is with the purpose of offending or alienating our allies. Even if you believe in the whole “America First,” how could that possibly be achieved by pushing away every other country except for maybe Russia or China.

My theory is that there is no goal. It’s just bullying for the sake of bullying.

I’m also in agreement with you there. I’d rather use Windows 11 than macOS, but that’s kinda like saying I’d rather have a lobotomy with a short icepick instead of a long one.

macOS

I am virtually never out of town, but if I was, then no, I wouldn’t worry.

If there was a technical problem that left my servers inaccessible, then oh well. It’s the same scenario as if I had shut them off. I’d fix it when I get back. This has never happened, though. I’ve had VMs crash, but I have never had a situation where any of my servers were completely inaccessible.

The only situation I can think of where I’d need to immediately shut down a server would be a drive failure in my ZFS array, but the chances of this happening in conjunction with a loss of connectivity are exceedingly unlikely. If it was a major concern, I’d write a script to power down the server when a drive fails.

You didn’t mention it directly, but if you want to access any of your hosted services remotely, you will almost certainly want some kind of VPN solution. I host a few things over HTTPS, but there’s no way I’m exposing anything critical directly to the internet.

I suppose it depends on your use case, but I would disagree with points 1 and 2. Network connectivity has an effect on your entire network and is absolutely crucial. Pfsense/OPNSense, DNS, etc should always be on server-class hardware. I run these as VM, but I would argue that best practice is to have them on their own bare-metal server-class hardware. File storage is also incredibly important, and even with backups, I don’t want my NAS going down. It also runs on server class-hardware.

The two items you mentioned are the two items I would be least comfortable running on consumer-grade hardware.

My server rack gets shut off in only two cases: I lose power and am too slow in firing up the generator before the UPS shuts the servers down, or I need to do major maintenance (like replacing a PCIe card). So, virtually never for the most part.

Too many important sevices need to stay running, even when I’m not at home.

I love it, and for anyone else who does, I have a suggestion.

Get a SodaStream (or whatever your carbonator-of-choice is) and a cheap adapter to run it from a standard CO2 tank. Not only do you save money on CO2 refills, but you save money on buying cans of seltzer, too. The concentrated flavor additives are only a few dollars at the grocery store.

I think my SodaStream was something like $100. The adapter and hoses were $50-ish. The flavor syrup costs around $5 for enough to make gallons. Every few months or more, I might pay $50 or so to refill a 20lb CO2 tank. It’s already paid for itself, and it’s incredibly convenient.

I generally buy almost everything online, but clothes are one exception to that. I generally have 1 or 2 brands of clothes I normally purchase, but even within those two brands, size can vary quite a bit, especially after they’ve been washed a few times.

I can buy two different size 36 pants from my favorite brand, and after washing, one fits comfortably, and the other only fits if I leave them unbuttoned. Being able to test them in-person at least gives me a general idea of if they’re still going to fit after they go through the dryer.

From what I understand of the Australian law, companies are prohibited from requiring a government-issued ID. In practical terms, how can this law be implemented, then? Bypassing a prompt that asks for a birthday is as easy as just lying. Other than requiring an ID, I honestly can’t fathom a way this would actually work. I suppose you could require a active credit card number, but that would exclude adults and kids over 16.

This makes me wonder why the point of this was. What does China gain by severing a communications cable? Traffic is just going to be re-routed over other links, so all they’re really doing is marginally slowing down internet connectivity in the region.

Is this just a way to send a message that they’re willing do damage communication infrastructure?

I’ll start: 39/M/US, so yeah, I fit the demographic.

I have never really considered Lemmy or Reddit to be “social media.” They’re entirely anonymous, and you’re not being exposed to posts where a apecific person is talking about themselves (at least for the most part). I think a modern equivalent to a PhpBB forum or (if you’re old) a BBS is more accurate.

Maybe I’m totally wrong, but doesn’t EGR stand for EXHAUST Gas Recirculation? Is the Volt a hybrid? I thought it was an EV and thus had no exhaust.

Edit: This was a joke, wasn’t it?

I was born in the 1980s. I remember growing up, I always had the impression that by this time in the 21st century, we’d have figured out some way to break the established laws of physics. Maybe it was because of watching so much sci-fi, but I feel like I’m not alone in this. The media seemed to reflect the same line of thinking. “Back to the Future 2” with its hoverboards and flying cars is now set several years in the past.

Be it anti-gravity, interstellar travel, teleportation, whatever, I always kind of assumed that by now, we’d at least have a working theory of how we might implement it in the next few decades. I think a lot of that has to do with the start of the “information age.” Computers and the way they could connect us were so revolutionary, it seemed like “magic” to the layperson. More “magic” would only be a few years away, right? If we could fit all this power into a box that sits on your desk, then it wasn’t beyond the scope of reason to think that anything was possible; it’d just take a few more years for us to figure it out, then we’d be planning the first NASA mission to another solar system.

What I never would have predicted is just how rapidly computer technology would advance. We now have supercomputers in our pockets, powered by CPUs that are well into the realm of nanotechnology and are now starting to run into limitations imposed by quantum physics. As a technological society, we’ve probably progressed farther than I would have ever imagined, just not in the way I expected.