Yeah they don’t force you to toss it if you have a scrap of trash in your pocket that you forgot about but they do make a stink about you having it because how dare you

I haven’t watched broadcast television or paid for service since about 2010. It was quite jarring watching cable news when in a hotel and just how little detail they give about anything while padding every story out with fluff so heavily. It was kind of insulting how they’d tease an upcoming story before every commercial break, except every time it would be the story right before the next break and somehow feel not even worth teasing once they gave you more than the teaser. Is this realy how people get their news? I can get a much better handle on local and world events in 30 minutes of reading a few news sources in the web than the fluff cable news gave me

It’s hilarious comparing the viewership of prime time TV programming to a random YouTube video or live stream made by a couple of people in their bedroom. Broadcast television is dead. It’s just a shambling zombie at this point, acting like it’s still relevant this far into the 21st Century

On the subject of Lost you could spend the same amount of time watching the entire Lost TV series watching Billiam’s retrospectives about the series!

…in case you want to spend 20 hours of your life watching a make a wish kid talk about Lost

Apparently YouTube has been supressing him from my recommendations lately so I guess I have some videos to catch up on

You can just directly stream the MST3K IPTV channel too!

https://iptv-org.github.io/channels/us/MysteryScienceTheater3000

And apparently the first 10 seasons are available for free streaming at their dedicated streaming service (their marketing also indicates there’s also free DRM-free downloads too! I need to dig into this at some point…)

https://www.gizmoplex.com/mst3k

https://mst3k.com/where-to-watch/

How did I end up on NCD again?

Quite frankly, a big part of managing the stress when looking at the macro-political situation and how that intertwines with the macro-econonics and fucks up the microeconomics of households, is to not dwell on it. Too much doomer content bringing you down? know when to stop consuming and do something else. There’s a point where you cannot change it and making yourself depressed thinking about it too much is just going to make your own life shittier.

I also work hard to find the best path to survive, thrive and live my best life. Sometimes that means taking some time to learn the rules of the game that’s set up so you don’t dive head first into the pitfalls that are setup for those who don’t pay attention to the rules. Learn more about the big scary words at play as you sign up for an insurance plan, and what they mean. Learn about interest (both on your debts and your funds) and how interest plays into your finances, how to budget and figure out what you can afford, and how to financially improve upon your previous choices that occurred either due to lack of knowledge or due to making the least bad decision available to you at a given point in time.

But also make sure to find joy and happiness in a bunch of different timescales to both be happier and improving yourself so that no matter how mundane your life is, you have sparks of joy to keep you always looking forwards to something:

• Small affordable indulgences, be that a yummy food like a small block of aged cheese, or maybe a small lego set or a small game. Whatever makes you happy that you wouldn’t normally spend on
• Take a moment to appreciate something in your environment. I like to take a minute to look at the stars every time I’m outside at night, but also actively take in the trees and patches of woodland and how they’re currently reacting to the weather. If you can keep a small plant, just checking in on your little potted plant every day can bring its own joy in caring for your little buddy
• Find a creative outlet, no matter how much you suck at it, just find something you can make that you enjoy making
• Pick something fun you can look forwards to at all times that’s just around the corner. A club that meets monthly to do a hobby you enjoy does well. I then try to also make sure to find some excuse to get together with friends and spend a little more money than I otherwise would every few months so its extra special and I can really look forward to those get togethers.
• Start exercising regularly. Your body was made to move, and making sure you’re actually using your body and pushing your muscles a bit 3-5 times a week is amazing for both your general health but also your mental health too. Take a walk, ride a bike, make a fool of yourself on a dance floor, struggle to do a pushup/pullup. It doesn’t have to be structured, just something to actually move your whole body throughout the week and actually use your muscles

TL;DR STOP DOOMSCROLLING AND GO POKE SOMETHING WITH A STICK…it might even be a little fun

I’m a be real, I didn’t know I needed to know about the models of water fountains I see in public spaces but now its tickled my autism and I just need to know more. Big water fountain got their money’s worth I think…

Ah I thought I had remembered their hard drive division being aquired but I was wrong! Per Wikipedia:

At least 218 companies have manufactured hard disk drives (HDDs) since 1956. Most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. None of the first several entrants (including IBM, who invented the HDD) continue in the industry today. Only three manufacturers have survived—Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital

The sad thing is when you can get actual numbers on what the costs of things are to the state and federal governments to keep things the way they currently are it’s really bonkers that policy is setup the way it’s setup.

The United States spends on average about $72,500 per year per incarcerated individual, which given the number of people who are in prison due to circumstances of poverty is a lot more than it would cost to simply have the funds available to individuals to intervene before they make the choices that land them in prison. For context the median individual income in the US is $37,585

Medicaid has an median cost per enrollee of $9,108 which is about the same unsubsidized cost of private health insurance, except Medicaid has no deductible, no copays (I believe some medications do have pretty low copays but that’s all that I’ve seen during periods where we did qualify or for my special needs child who’s on a special Medicare plan for children with disabilities) and generally means you simply receive the care you need without paying a dime to the medical facility. In other words, Americans could feasibly collectively pay the government exactly what they already pay private insurance companies in premiums and receive better coverage for less cost than under the current system.

The average cost per homeless person (this is primarily a cost in extra social services to support their existence) is $35,500 per year in the US. The average annual cost of rent in US is $20,400. The US could simply pay to rent every homeless person an average apartment in the country and save $15,000/year per person in social services, and that’s before even considering more creative options such as public housing, or providing subsidies/incentives to house the housing insecure in lower cost regions of their respective states (which might well save small town America, given most small towns are consistently shrinking in population)

The unavoidable conclusion is that American politicians simply choose to burn unthinkable billions of dollars every year to perpetuate human suffering

There’s a number of mods that add space travel. Ad Astra is the most recent one

I specifically remember being in elementary school and learning that the school code of conduct disallowed “throwing of missiles” which was a blanket term for any item that the school deemed should not have been thrown including snowballs

I doubt the high pitched whine that you’re hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is…honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I’ve got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!

And oftentimes some or all of the metadata that helps the filesystem find the files on the drive is stored in memory (zfs is famous for its automatic memory caching) so seek times are further irrelevant in the context of media playback

SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs

Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it’s being backed up (and if it’s not backed up it’s not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I’ll happily give real backup advise if you need it)

In my anecdotal experience across both my family’s various computers and computers I’ve seen bite the dust at work, I’ve not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I’ve only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I’ve never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)

Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don’t need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don’t even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh…check your backups I guess?

Only if your employer requires a doctor’s note for sick days. Honestly if I ever have another job that does require a doctor’s note I might just make a habit of forging those because fuck that noise

The local bus company does a “mystery bus trip” every couple of months or so where you pay a flat fee, hop on the bus and go do something. They give you just enough info to know if you might want to do it or not and how to dress and the rest is just up to whatever happens

Realistically the difference is in how Linux mitigates the common vectors for attack that Windows doesn’t. Most malware targeting individual workstations gets in by either supply chain attack, vulnerable web renderer or by tricking the user into installing it.

Centralized repositories with centralized build tooling limits opportunities for supply chain attacks, plus helps prevent users from accidentally downloading a Trojan when trying to grab other software. Containerizing web applications helps limit browser exploits, and less “features” phoning home means a default incoming-deny firewall policy will largely prevent most vulnerabilities from being remotely serious.

So for an individual workstation, Linux is significantly safer from viruses. In the enterprise it’s a completely different story where the threat environment does require defense in depth regardless of your choices of vendors

Yup we teach our kids not to use “grownup words” and that they can use “grownup words” when they’re grownups and can make the grownup decision of when and when not to swear. Because ultimately that both meets societies expectations related to swear words while fostering a healthy relationship with language.