Just bathe.

Spoken like someone who lives in a cold dry climate. I could bake cookies inside of my car in the summertime, and it is regularly well above the safe wet bulb temperature for human tolerances, even in the shade. You walk outside, and it feels like you’re breathing hot swamp-flavored fog. Bathing alone isn’t enough in those circumstances, because you’ll be a sweaty mess by the time you get to work anyways. Bathing is important, but you also need something to stop the sweat from immediately making you stink again.

“Military grade” means “made by the cheapest contractor available, using sub-par materials, to juuuuuust meet the bare minimum requirements set by the government”.

It’s like when housing developers advertise that all of their houses are “built to code”. Congrats, building code is the bare minimum requirement for the house to be considered habitable. It needs to be up to code to be able to sell. Someone advertising that a house is “built to code” is saying “we would build this worse if we were legally allowed to do so, but the law says we weren’t allowed to cut any more corners and still pass an inspection.”

Tax productivity, not work. Worker productivity has skyrocketed in the past few decades, but taxes have remained constant. So the rich have been able to extract increasing amounts of productivity, while paying proportionally less and less in taxes. Meanwhile, worker wages have remained stagnant, meaning their productivity has gone up but they’re still being paid (and taxed) the same.

Wealth taxes should still absolutely be a thing, but they should be entirely divorced from a work (productivity) tax.

Yeah, my smart TVs are the noisiest devices on my network, by far. In a day of heavy usage where I’m doomscrolling and constantly scrolling past ads, my phone may log ~2500 blocked requests. My Roku and Samsung TVs both average around 7000 blocked requests per day, even when we haven’t used them at all. That’s a request to their data-harvesting and ad servers getting blocked every ~12 seconds, even when they’ve been turned “off” all day.

Rephrased
BREAKING NEWS!:
62% of republicans believe Trump is hiding Epstein ties, but still actively support him.

A squatter is why Valve used steampowered.com instead of steam.com. The owner of steam.com (who has owned the domain since the early 90s!) has consistently refused to sell to anyone, and has never stated a specific reason why.

I have a similar story… But first off, you can do that directly through the pihole’s UI. No need to set up custom DNS stuff just for her. Just create an empty blocklist, and assign her devices to only use that list. Multiple blocklists are also handy if you have kids, because you can set things like porn blocklists, and only assign them to the kids’ devices. So you can still jork it when you want, without the kids being able to accidentally stumble across anything.

I have a basic blocklist for guests as well, which is the default list for any new device that connects to my guest network. It selectively blocks some of the more invasive BS but doesn’t block some of the more “this will make things on your device stop working” trackers, like how some Google devices refuse to work unless you allow their trackers.

I’m pretty sure you can even set lists to default based on an IP range? Like if you have multiple subnets for different VLANs, you can set a default list (or lists) for each VLAN. So like you can have an IoT VLAN with a default “stop phoning home, I just want to be able to cast to you” type of blocklist. Then your guest VLAN can have its own default list. And your personal devices can have their own list as well. I haven’t personally dug into that yet, but it’s on my list of future projects.

My wife was annoyed with my dual piholes until I got some basic whitelists dialed in for her. She’s a stock Android user, and my Google blocklist broke basically all of her phone’s native apps… Because Google’s invasive tracking is fully wormed through all of them.

It basically took an evening of us hunt-and-peck’ing our way through her phone’s blocked requests, whitelisting one thing at a time to see what was necessary and what was just tracking BS. I set her up with an automatic VPN that connected whenever she was away from the house, so she was always connected to the home network, and always protected by the pihole. Once we got that figured out, (and she learned to stop clicking the damned sponsored Google search results, which fail to connect with the pihole), she basically stopped noticing it. She got used to having it. She started taking it for granted…

We recently moved, and I haven’t had time to set my media/server stuff back up yet. I’m just running the basic ISP modem/router for the time being. And now that she got used to the pihole, she has been hit with whiplash because she’s suddenly seeing ads again. She visited her usual World of Warcraft site, and was like “what the fuck is this? The damned site is basically unusable…” She insists on using Chrome, (because it’s what her phone uses, and she wants to sync between the two), so I was only able to install the lite version of uBlock Origins as a stopgap, because Google intentionally broke the full version.

What really got her was when she noticed our Roku TV’s idle screen suddenly had ads. She was like “what the hell do you mean the goddamned TV has built-in ads? We aren’t even watching anything right now! It’s just the fucking sleep screen!”

Yes dear, why do you think I insisted on setting the pihole up years ago? Ads are invasive, and you don’t even realize how bad it is until you’re out. Once you get used to living without them, going back is rough.

I’ve literally heard coworkers mention the whole “I actually don’t want a raise because my taxes would go up and I’d make less” bullshit before. I do what I can to redirect them when I hear it, but some people are extremely dug into their worldview and don’t want to be helped. Like acknowledging a progressive tax rate would require acknowledging that their entire concept of income and taxation is built on a lie.

That just means you’re not paying taxes on the income. It’s not like you get the entire $700 back in taxes, because your tax rate probably isn’t 100%. If you pay 30% in taxes, (no clue what you actually pay), writing off the $700 would simply mean you pay $210 less on your taxes.

They already do. Paid parking is a thing in pretty much every city in America. In many places, parking lots are wildly profitable. Each parking spot can often earn upwards of $50 per hour during surges.

Paid parking lots in Dallas average somewhere around $8 per hour. That’s with some people paying like $30 for three hours, or $60 for all-day parking. Assuming a ~50% occupancy (busy during the day, emptier overnight) will have a 100 spot lot taking home around $9600 per day.

That’s a number that many coffee shops and convenience stores could only dream of… And the lot doesn’t even need to worry about things like maintaining inventory or hiring cashiers. Their overhead costs are basically nonexistent. They just plop a sign with a QR code at the entrance for people with Apple/Google Pay, and have an automated card reader for the people who don’t have phones. A pair of minimum wage attendants can watch multiple lots in a few city blocks, golf carting between them every ~20 minutes as they make the rounds to scan license plates and make sure people are paid up. Maybe give the attendant who calls in the most tows an extra vacation day each quarter to keep them “motivated”.

Security cameras make limiting your security liability easy. Hell, in many cases tow truck companies will even pay the owner to be allowed to tow from their lots. Because the tow company makes money every single time they snag a car, so they’ll pay a percentage of that to be allowed to tow cars from their lots. So towing enforcement actually makes you money instead of being an expense.

I mean yeah, the poverty line is unrealistically low. It’s tied to the average annual price of food, even though food is not a major expense in most impoverished households. Truly broke people are spending like five dollars a day on food, with beans, rice, lentils, bouillon, spices, and whatever else they happen to have available/find on sale in a 20 year old crockpot. Food is a negligible expense when you take the time to prep, and truly impoverished people don’t have a choice. They’re forced to prep, or else they’ll starve.

The other costs, like rent, car payments, utilities, etc., have all massively ballooned in comparison to the price of food. Rent only used to account for ~20% of expenses, but now it often accounts for over 50%… But since the poverty line is tied directly to food, it hasn’t adjusted to maintain a realistic measure of expenses.

While I agree with Section 230 in theory, it is often only used in practice to protect megacorps. For example, many Lemmy instances started getting spammed by CSAM after the Reddit API migration. It was very clearly some angry redditors who were trying to shut down instances, to try and keep people on Reddit.

But individual server owners were legitimately concerned that they could be held liable for the CSAM existing on their servers, even if they were not the ones who uploaded it. The concern was that Section 230 would be thrown out the window if the instance owners were just lone devs and not massive megacorps.

Especially since federation caused content to be cached whenever a user scrolled past another instance’s posts. So even if they moderated their own server’s content heavily (which wasn’t even possible with the mod tools that existed at the time), then there was still the risk that they’d end up cacheing CSAM from other instances. It led to a lot of instances moving from federation blacklists to whitelists instead. Basically, default to not federating with an instance, unless that instance owner takes the time to jump through some hoops and promises to moderate their own shit.

Personal projects. Not everything has to be FOSS. My tiny little script to automate my lights turning green and my smart speaker playing All-Star by Smash Mouth at full volume, so I can jork it in peace? That shit doesn’t need to be public.

FWIW, Plappa works really well on iOS. It’s not the official ABS app, but it was obviously designed around ABS. It has all of the features as the official app, without the whole “try every month to get into the TestFlight beta, because TestFlight hard caps the user count” BS.

+1 for Home Assistant, though the Docker implementation doesn’t allow add-ons. That may be fine at first, but a lot of the more complicated setup requires add-ons. For me, it was worth it to just go ahead and grab an HA Green to run my HA stuff.

I pledge allegiance/
To the brand/
Of the Corporate States of America,/
And to the conglomerate/
For which it pays/
One market, under profit,/
Credit-driven/
With liberty and justice/
For shareholders

It’s also because YT drastically changed their payment scheme a while back. They used to pay out based on views, (IIRC a view was counted as 85% of the video watched) which encouraged creators to create short videos. After all, 85% of a 2 minute video is only ~100 seconds. But 85% of a 20 minute video is 17 minutes. And both the 100 second and 17 minute view paid out the same amount. So creators prioritized shorter videos, because not very many people had the time or attention span for the 17 minutes of watch time required for a single view.

But YouTube changed that a while ago, and now they pay out based on total watch time. Now that 2 minute video needs to attract 10x as many viewers, in order to pay out the same as a single viewer on a 20 minute video. Since new viewers are harder to attract, creators began prioritizing longer videos to make the most of their limited viewer base.

Nope. DisplayPort can adapt to HDMI or DVI passively. It won’t support the proprietary bullshit like HDCP, but it will be able to display video just fine. Pin 13 on DP is specifically used to detect adapters, so the output device can automatically change to using an HDMI protocol if it detects an HDMI adapter. This technically requires a dual-mode DP port to automatically adapt, but the vast majority of DP connectors produced in the past several years are dual-mode.

But going the other direction (HDMI to DP) requires an active adapter, to strip out all of the proprietary HDMI-only bullshit.

Yes, DP converts to HDMI natively. But because HDMI has so much proprietary BS built in, going from HDMI to DP requires an active adapter which strips out the proprietary BS.

Also, don’t use the default “data/media/{library name}” (or whatever the suggested format is) folder setup that the Trash Guide has you set up. At least change the “tv”, “movies”, etc name to something different. Jellyfin has a known vulnerability where an attacker can get access to media without valid credentials if they already know the file path. Jellyfin devs have stated that they have no intention of ever fixing this, because it would require completely divesting from the Kodi branch that everything is built on. And since everyone follows the Trash Guide to set their *Arr stack and library up, guessing file paths is laughably easy.

You’re using the suggested file naming in your *Arr stack, so Jellyfin can automatically match media? Congrats, so is everyone else. You’re using the suggested folder layout so your *Arr stack can use hardlinks? Congrats, so is everyone else. At least change the library folder names. Since your library folder doesn’t need to match the name of your Jellyfin library, you can literally have your “tv”, “movies”, and other folders be named whatever you want. Hell, name your tv folder “peepee” and your movies folder “poopoo” for all I care.