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.

When an alcoholic sets about seeking forgiveness, they’re supposed to go around to the people they’ve wronged and apologize. They’re also supposed to recognize that they make poor alcohol choices and need to give it up.

Maybe the MAGA people could recognize that they make poor political choices and give up their voting and their activism.

Like, I try to think how I would react if I made a choice so monumentally bad that thousands of people died, people were tortured, or an entire national economy thrown into disarray. There’s no reparation I could pay to compensate; no sacrifice I could make to balance the scale. That’s kind of the point of forgiveness: the wounded party has not been made whole, maybe can not be made whole, but accepts that trying to wring compensation out of the offender will only make another injured party. But there’s still the question of how to keep the offender from doing it again.

Not a farmer, but my romanticized view of “proper” farming is a partnership with nature to get the whole ecosystem to focus on human-useful products. Apparently, that’s not particularly profitable to the person trying to single-handedly farm a square mile or more, and discoveries like this seem one more way to decouple food production from natural processes. One more step in converting farms into factories.

I spend a good part of the day just trying to keep it running.

True that. When I stopped working, I added regular exercise, hoping to stave off the decay as long as possible. Working OK so far, but I know that it’s inevitable for doctor visits to become part of the routine. Just the next phase of life, and I’m going to have to figure out how to make the most of it. Keep the brain sharp - the modern world has a lot more opportunities to share my brain than the old world.

Similar boat: I am fine; everyone else seems fucked.

I suspect this is why those old robber barons had such elaborate social circuits: to keep themselves distracted from the shit going on around them and any role they played in creating said shit.

There’s not much an individual can do about the systemic decline. I mean, vote for people who seem like they’ll work against it, but that’s kind of tears-in-the-sea.

You spent your working years trying to do the right thing & help your country/people on a large scale; you can do that in retirement on a small scale. Look for a mutual aid group, help your neighbors, look for local NPOs who could use your skills. When the system sucks, we have to help each other outside of the system. Remind each other that people are actually, usually, pretty decent, and that our perceptions get twisted by a handful of ragin psychoaths who have somehow gotten to be in charge.

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.

I added homeassistant and some power monitors to my stack, and the IT rack comes in around 1.5 kWh/day - one of the biggest power budgets in the house, even with a low-power CPU, after adding in a few HDDs, a couple switches, and the cable modem. I’m also in a cheap power state, so it’s not a financial pressure, just surprising how quickly 10W here, 10W there…add up. At $0.50/kWh, I’d think solar would be a no-brainer.

If you can master the card/cabinet scraper, it’s much safer that a paint scraper - much more of a finishing tool than a stripping tool. Straight BLO, with no varnish, isn’t going to be a film amenable to paint scraper, anyway: you’ll need to remove some wood to get the contaminated finish out, and a card scraper will do that thousandth-of-an-inch at a time, without kicking up the dust that sandpaper would.

eg: https://taytools.com/taytools-3-piece-set-with-rectangle-gooseneck-and-curved-cabinet-scrapers

Stumpy Nubs’ howto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7ZyFT24oOc

Keep power in mind. For most home-use services, you don’t really need much computing power, and you might be able to do all you want with a single box. Even 30W, 24/7 is $25 (@10¢/kWh)-125(@50¢)/year of electricity. That said, it’s a small price to learn how to do clustering or swarms.

I’d guess that your biggest load would be transcoding in Jellyfin, for which Intel Gen 6 added h265 to quicksync. The Gen 3/4 CPUs in M73 would be extra slow with most modern codecs.

I’d think it would be obvious as a general principle, and I’m kind of surprised that AOC’s position is more strict: Don’t trust MTG on Gaza or Israel.

My setup is a pile of kludges built on top of each other over the last two decades.

I started with ULAs distributed through DHCP, connected to named, which allows hosts do declare their own name and let me access local services as though I had a real domain.

My ISP eventually started supporting IPV6, but only assigned /128, so the ULAs got NAT-6ed out to the real world.

I eventually learned how to request prefix delegation from the ISP and set up SLAAC.

So now, my PIv6 clients have a) their link-local address, b) the ULA, c) a “privacy” SLAAC, and d) a unique SLAAC. All my internal services still refer to the ULAs.

I don’t think I’d recommend this system for someone setting up from scratch. The easiest thing would be to go with SLAAC, if you can get prefix delegation, and set your DNS/pihole to send the unique-SLAAC address of any servers you run.

Maybe they do commercial customers different, but I’m about 30 miles north of the site in question, and my water use is reported in real time. I can even get a daily report from their web site. It’s hard to believe they’d be less interested in the usage of their 1e6-gallon-per-year commercial customers than their 1e4-gallon-per-year residential customers.

Water company can measure the water that leaves their pumping station(s) - just put a flow meter on the one big pipe. If that doesn’t match the sum of all their customer meters, then water is going somewhere else - broken pipe, illegal connection, meter fraud, whatever.

I would guess that most jurisdictions already have that one big flow meter, because they have to comply with water rights agreements, have to know how much chlorine & fluoride to inject, etc.

Kind of fascinating that they don’t do any kind of reconciliation of water delivered against water billed. You’d think that would be an easy thing to do and a good way to discover leaks (or theft). I mean, there would definitely be ‘missing’ water due to leaks, fire department, etc, but one imagines that would have some kind of normal/tolerable range, and that 30 million missing gallons would trigger some kind of investigation prior to customer complaints.