In the spirit of calling cops pigs, I’m thinking we should start calling DOJ lawyers joey: little kangaroos, with their little kangaroo courts.

50 TB isn’t even that much space, certainly not for a broadcaster. No reason not to have a local copy. 50 PB, I could see a small PBS affiliate not having the resources to manage locally, but you can put 50 TB in consumer-grade NAS.

Somewhere around 35% of the people who voted in 2024 were GenX. GenX are taking over corporate leadership, where mandatory retirement is forcing Boomers out. Millenials may still be too young to vote in large enough numbers to dominate 2028. If you insist on seeing reality as generational warfare, Gen X is definitely ascendant, and definitely the culpable in Trump’s re-elected.

Near as I remember, “we need every seat to gain/maintain a majority and resist MAGA” has been the sole argument of the DNC in every race since 2016.

ARPA paid my health insurance premiums, in full, until this year.

I feel like people forget that the alternative to Fetterman was Dr Oz.

Swapping Fetterman for Oz would have given the GOP majorities in both House and Senate, put Mitch McConnell back as Senate President, and generally been an objectively worse outcome.

All the thermostats I’ve looked at - definitely all the “smart” ones, accommodate all manner of existing wiring. If you just have a ‘normal’ HVAC with a single aircon, single furnace, and fan, or one with heat pump, backup furnace & fan, then any thermostat out there will work. If it has internal logic, it’s going to have a place for batteries, but it will also (probably) have the capability to run off furnace power, if you have the right wires. Smart thermostats will report their battery state to homeassistant, or you can just change the battery when you switch it over to heating for winter.

Swapping a thermostat is pretty easy - it’s literally ‘connect red wire to terminal labeled red.’ It’s complicated if you care what the red, yellow, blue &c wires actually do, but the install itself is just color matching.

If you have an extremely high efficiency HVAC, or one with multiple heat sources & multiple compressors, then there may be more than the usual 6-ish wires, but even there, it will be an exercise of taking wire from its current, clearly labeled terminal and plugging it into the same labeled terminal on the new thermostat.

If you can stick with the same vendor for a thermostat upgrade, it may make the job very easy. I replaced a Honeywell programmable thermostat with one of their smart thermostats, and I didn’t even have to change wires. Both thermostats plugged into the same backing/terminal block. I literally pulled the old one off and pushed the new one on in 10 seconds. No tools.

I believe it’s that older HVAC controls don’t have a true ground/neutral, so they can’t actually consume power. Thermostat is (used to be) basically just a remote switch, just connecting the signal wire to its various functions, so there’s no need for it to have any kind of power. More recent systems have a ground (C wire), so you can draw power between the 24V R wire and the C common/ground. Some systems even put mains voltage on R.

After I got pm2.5 into homeassistant, I started buying MERV13 filters for central air. A jury-rigged system for turning that on/off graduated to a proper wireless thermostat, and I now have an automation that turns the fan on at pm2.5>10, then back off <3. A good 5" filter will last 9 months before the time-to-clear gets to be too long. 3 ug/m3 can be a difficult lower bound, and if it seems like we get into a bad outside aq period, I’ll bump it up to 6 with a trigger at 15. MERV11 could not hold even 10 ug/m3.

My indoor aq sensor spikes from fireworks on 4th of July and neighbors cooking on the other side of the shared wall. Most interesting to me is that aq - both inside and out - is worst overnight, not at rush hour.

ed: I use https://map.purpleair.com/ for outdoor air quality. Their global data can be polled with a (free) API key, and as long as you don’t poll too often, the free data limit will last years. Someone wrote an HA integration for purpleair, but it polls to often and rapidly exhausts the free data.

Politicians, and even corporate C-suite, often confuse “cheaper to buy from the incumbent” with “incumbent has impossible-to-replicate technology,” completely ignoring that it’s way easier to invent something the second time.

Technology might have been a barrier in 1960’s China, but they’re a peer nation today.

There’s a wider spectrum of “consuming audiobook” than of “reading.”

Listening to that audobook so it’s easier to take notes? Definitely as good as reading.

Audiobook on while you’re on the treadmill? I guess there’s some people who can read on the treadmill, so maybe it’s similar, but it strikes me as very different levels of attention and likely recall.

Audiobook on while you do chores, cook, or write some other project? Definitely not equivalent to reading.

I know a couple of people IRL who never seem to have a positive reaction to anything. The proverbial “every silver lining has a cloud” people: got a raise? just means more taxes. Sunny day? skin cancer. Cloudy day? cold and mud.

For the particular people I know, it seems like a self-esteem thing - like they don’t feel themselves worthy of happiness, so they have to preemptively destroy anything positive. Or maybe just be contrarian to prove they’re smarter than everyone else. It’s exhausting.

most seem to believe that voting makes them complicit in perpetuating the broken system

Maybe, if they’re in a militia training to overthrow the system. Otherwise, they’re just short of Sovereign Citizens, imagining they’ve got a cheat code to escape the moral burden of the failing system. I mean, definitely, let’s change the system, but in the meantime, let’s try for the least bad actors we can.

The oldest GenX were only 15 when Reagan got elected. Even for Clinton, X were still voting in small enough numbers to lay the blame on Silent & Boomers.

You may be thinking of the Greatest Generation.

I think most people put Boomers as 60-80 in 2026. 81+ are “Silent Generation,” and Gen X 40-60.

Sad to say, it looks like we can blame Gen X even more than Boomers for Trump.

Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Used to be that a college degree indicated people with time, money, and drive to put four years into study. It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person. Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

Agree. I’d love to see someone do a rigorous accounting of any degree program, especially with international comparisions. I once went through a couple of US state universities, and that generally supported the hypothesis of ‘cost of instruction hasn’t changed in 50 years, but burden of payment has shifted from state taxes to tuition,’ but that was based on whatever the schools published as ‘cost of instruction.’ I’d believe that international cost of instruction follows purchasing price pairity, and it seems more expensive in the US because it’s all tuition and no public payment.

When she first showed up, I remember one particular picture of her being all over right wing media. Not the most flattering picture, obviously. She was smiling especially broadly, showing lots of teeth, eyes wide open (“bugged out”). Sometimes associated with speculation that she might have Graves disease or some developmental disorder.

No question her appearance has made the media give her more time than they might, but she has a compelling story and she’s connected with millennial voters much better than her septuagenarian peers.

Docs in the rest of the world don’t start with $200k student loans, and nurses don’t start $50k in debt. US medicare for all won’t magically give us Swedish hospital rates.