I painted my NAS red and you won’t believe the improvements

Okay this just unlocked a random memory. Back when I worked at a call center, on a slow day a lady called about a product that we no longer directly supported, and she went on a huge tangent about how everything she buys is bright red to remind her of the fires of hell. Bright red purse, bright red clothing, bright red phone, bright red computer, etc. she also told me quite a bit about a children’s book series she wrote about a Christian dog

If gym membership shenanigans are what’s keeping you from becoming a more fit version of yourself, might I suggest a home workout regime?

Not long into the COVID lockdowns a coworker at the call center I was working at pointed me towards Hybrid Calisthenics. It’s all workouts primarily using your body weight, minimal equipment (and there’s variations or alternate workouts if you want to skip one requiring equipment) and there’s variations of every workout for any level of physical strength from “I struggle to make it through the grocery store” to “I can lift a literal car” and the guy who does it does a brilliant job of explaining how to work out and how to do each excercise

I got a gym membership from a small independent gym hoping to avoid this bullshit. Nah I still had to replace my credit card to get them to stop charging it despite multiple calls, texts and emails demanding fill ceasure, only I had the pleasure of getting to argue with the owner of the business rather than some peonn at the business

When it comes to PC OEMs I’ve observed that right now Dell has really good driver support. They’ve got increasingly good utilities for keeping drivers up to date and they’ve been doing a good job of loading drivers and their utilities into Microsoft’s relevant repositories where it makes sense, and that driver support tends to actually last multiple years. I can often pull down a new UEFI update for a 5 year old Dell PC, which is not something I can say of most hardware manufacturers.

So at the threat model of an enterprise org, I’d prefer Dell for that reason alone. Lenovo and HP have tried to implement some of that, HP seems to have given up after building the bare minimum and Lenovo has their typical wonky software that will become good after a few years if they keep investing developer time into it, but knowing Lenovo there’s about a 60% chance some new executive will come in and change direction, and the software will be made increasingly unusable then later discontinued due to lack of use

However for my personal computers, there’s a high chance it won’t even be running Windows so I just buy based on hardware & price alone

My very first desk job was an outsourced support role where 99% of calls we simply found the answer in the user manual and provided that to them. The other 1% was usually something isoteric we’d forward on to someone within the company. The amount of callers who’d say “I’ve read the user manual cover to cover and I just can’t figure out how to…” And I’d just try to page 12 on the PDF and read them the instructions word for word

At the scale of HP, I can see the logic. You know that, say 60% of calls are directly covered by the knowledge base because you have those metrics. That’s means 60% of their support overhead could be eliminated if they somehow got people to read those documents. Hardware sales usually have very thin margins and a customer contacting support can easily cost more in support than the entire profit margin of the product (and often it’s a self-inflicted problem) and of course an RMA for most products basically negates all profit from that sale. It’s a real business challenge and the asshole solution is to simply tie people up for 15 minutes in the phone system before connecting to a human to see how many people hang up and how much that reduces support load

I tried that and gave up after a year because it was getting old running to the library every few months to print that one page I needed for something odd that came up. Granted it’s been one of those years where so much life insanity happens that you have to work through. But now I’m happy that I can also print coloring pages and anything else I feel like printing on top of insurance documents that the DMV needs me to mail and passport applications and new tax forms for fun new tax challenges I’ve found myself in, and so on.

I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since

Plot twist: you now get to go to one of RFK Jr’s farms

There’s a lot of assumptions going on here. First of all, historically 26 wasn’t the maximum for the draft but 40, but secondly there’s really no rules for a draft. A draft is already so much of an encroachment on one’s human rights and legal rights that all bets are off should one be declared. Sure there’ll be court orders and legal battles over it but we’ve seen how that goes already with the current administration, they’ll simply delay and ignore while shuffling as many humans out of reach as possible until they can’t anymore.

Best thing any of us can do is simply hope for the best. My personal hopes are, in order of declining positivity:

• There is no draft
• I’m either too old or too autistic to be drafted
• I can go back to college to be ineligible to be drafted
• I can find myself a non-combat role given my technical expertise
• Whatever happens happens and I’ll figure out how to survive and thrive like I have every other challenge that’s come my way in life

There’s really no other planning for such an eventuality. There’s too many unknowns you can plan for, and while I’m seeing plenty of folks talking about fragging, taking drugs or establishing a false history of drug abuse, transitioning, etc. the fact is there’s no telling what will happen nor what the legal landscape will look like

Do you think they’d actually bring back the draft?

On one hand a draft would be extremely daft on many fronts. It would make an unpopular president far more unpopular, it would put guns into the hands of a ton of disgruntled people, and there’s generally plenty of willing recruits based purely off of the economic benefits of volunteering

On the other hand, the way his administration is talking to the media it really sounds like they’re trying to lay the groundwork for a draft, including most notably saying why Trump’s youngest son “isn’t eligible to be drafted” (any normal politician would explain why their kid was “choosing not to enlist”)

Latest jobs report showed a reduction in total jobs in the economy of 80k. The recession that’s been trying to happen for years is finally about to happen.

It’s really hilarious because economic indicators were all looking super good going into the 2024 election, and even jobs were starting to show some growth after being a bit slow following the insanity of 2021-22. Trump could simply walked in and went to sleep and the economy would be in brilliant shape right now but instead we have this

Yeah gas prices (about the only commodity that normies interact with) have only gone up by like 30-40 cents per gallon, about the same price they were 6-12 months ago. Normies only wake up once it gets to around $4/gallon or about a full dollar per gallon more than usual.

The last time gas prices went over $4 a gallon I heard many drivers of excessively large gas guzzling SUVs and Trucks complaining that they couldn’t fully fill their tanks due to the $100 limit on most gas pumps.

The $4 mark was also when people started actually making choices to drive less (and voicing these choices) and if it was sustained they seemed likely to choose to replace their vehicles with something more efficient

Streamer mode is typically for one of two usecases:

1. The streamer plays their own music, so being able to silence all game music simplifies things
2. The game might contain copyrighted music by known artists, which can trigger automated enforcement. In most jurisdictions music used in a game is fine to stream/record because it’s covered by the developer’s/distributor’s license, but that doesn’t stop overzealous rights holders from placing bogus claims that can muck up your revenue, so it’s easier to just not play music that you don’t yourself have license to play

The price is irrelevant, because they aren’t for you or regular consumers. They’re already reserved and being shipped to AI data centers.

I mean this is the standard operating procedure for all top end data center products, they aren’t sold on consumer marketplaces but can be purchased by suppliers with existing contracts and relationships

As they ramp up yields larger capacity drives will slowly trickle into more consumer channels until eventually the 40+TB drives are like the 8-12tb drives are today

we will be left with many living MAGA in our prisons

Conveniently they’ve been building tons of prisons that could be put to use for this

I’m really struggling to make heads or tails of your core point that you’re trying to make.

I shared my story about trying to do some car replacement trips by acoustic bike, how it took a full year of training to be able to consistently make the school runs by bike (with a trailer mind you), and then pointed out how ebikes completely remove that physical fitness requirements while providing all of the same benefits of an accoustic bike

Also I love how you keep changing and leaving out details of my story as you go along. I really can’t shake the feeling you’re not actually trying to make any specific point and just want to argue with people

Bruh you seem really stuck on this idea of “dormant physical athleticism” whatever that means.

Let me break this down for you, the human body has muscles, these are like motors for moving bits of flesh and bone around. Like motors, the amount of physical energy they output changes based on the energy that gets input. Since humans don’t really have control of the chemical energy flow to these muscles, the way you can change that is by pushing these muscles to their limits, and as you keep doing that these limits start increasing.

Its really quite awesome, because unlike most things in life, your muscle gain directly correlates to the amount of work you put in. Its one of the few things you can directly control!

You should probably reread my comment because that was literally what I said

Side note about normal bikses: The way I compare them, normal bikes are limited to physical exertion. Ebikes are limited to time, very similar to cars. Though at the long range cars are still more comfortable

I started biking again 2 years ago, honestly partly pushed by various city planning/car rejection media when I realized I could start being the change I want to see in the world. I’d done some strength training during the pandemic but holy crap was I not in shape enough to be biking. It took me a full year of biking nearly every day to be able to bike my kids to school in a trailer (about 2 miles round trip)

Even now where I finished last summer biking over 22 very hilly miles, I struggled to bike to a haircut just a mile away after just 3 months of winter hibernation, and now that it’s early spring I got up to 5 miles so far within a few bike rides.

Point is, for the average adult, biking is an option but it takes a ton of time and work to build up your strength. Ebikes completely change the game because anyone can ride 10-20 miles on those, and if you have balance issues or other health issues you can get an etrike! They’re such incredible life changing machines!

I just want to say, I absolutely love this kind of question because it forces you to imagine realistically what a car-lite world would look like, and it completely changes the line of thinking from problem identification to problem solving, and in a way that truly will change the world for the better